Doubra Ari > Recent Status Updates

“But the male gaze is a God’s eye view, which is to say omnipresent and internalized.

“Shame lets you know you’re on the wrong, which is why you should trust it.”

“Unless we learn to love God’s creation, we can neither truly love nor truly know God.”

“But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go to childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die.”

“Grief is a swallow, he said. One day you wake up and you think it’s gone, but it’s only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.”

..Meanwhile, the second generation chose to suppress the past, both what they knew and did not know of it. In contrast, the third generation were eager to dig away and unearth silences.
How strange that in families scarred by wars, forced displacements and acts of brutality, it was the youngest who seemed to have the oldest memory.”

She was, however, troubled to observe deep rifts between family members of different ages. Way too often, the first generation of survivors, the ones who had suffered the most, kept their pain close to the surface, memories like splinters lodged under their skin, some protruding, others completely invisible to the eye.”

“Someday this pain will be useful to you.”

“because there is one thing I have learned: wherever there is war and a painful partition, there will be no winners, human or otherwise.”

“Time is a songbird, and just like any other songbird it can be taken captive. It can be held prisoner in a cage and for even longer than you might think possible. But time cannot be kept in check in perpetuity.
No captivity is forever.”

“A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference.
Cartography is another name for stories told by winners.
For stories told by those who have lost, there isn't one.”

“You’re allowed to just live. “

“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You’re not separate or other. You’re an animal and animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine so do I. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and Marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that or, or earn

“ Dying things often are… I think there’s something beautiful about being lucky enough to witness a thing on its way out.”

Allahlae? God, the universe?

Dex is a monk. Queer. Wants to be a tea monk and start life afresh in a new place far away from the city. They prefer the quiet life and nature. But they also lack experience in this new venture.

“My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to change my life.”

“That was the beauty of sleep— reality, detached itself, and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream.”

“That love was a terrible agony.”

“Dreams are terrifying things. No—they’re humiliating. They reveal things about you that you weren’t even aware of.”

“Was there such a thing as wanting to see when all that remained of you was your shadow.”

“There are people that brandish their sharpest weapon as they are taking their leave.”

“I had not reconciled with life. But I had to keep on living.”

“Life was exceedingly vulnerable, I realized. The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to crease- so easily, and by a single decision.”

“What are the odds of being born in a war-torn shithole? Considering most of the planet lives on nothing, and considering there’s never being an era of peace in all of recorded history, you’d say pretty high.”

“All bad things have happened already. It cannot get worse than this.”

This statement is equal part comforting and terrifying.

“Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own interest: that is what should make us shudder.”

“Ponnaya” - a slur for gay people. It’s a Sinhalese insult.

“The thing that makes you the most Sri Lankan is not your father’s surname or the holy place where you kneel, nor the smile you plaster on your face to hide your fears. It the knowing of other Lankans and those Lankans’ Lankans.”

Funny how Asian and African cultures sometime share similarities.

“We are all born into continuity in time and the past continues to live within the present.”