Blessy Samjose > Recent Status Updates

“While you learn to cook, your soul will simmer” 🤭

“A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all he has been denied.”

“A little magic. A talent for taking a beating. A demon at her side. That was all she had. That was all she needed.”

“The devil knows your name now, Galaxy Stern.”

“We do what we have to do,” Alex said. “That’s the only job of a survivor.”

“You always looked like you had trouble chasing you”
“So?”
“Now you look like it caught up.”

“Only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you”

“The greatest gift Lethe had given Alex was not the full ride to Yale […] It was the knowledge, the certainty, that the things she saw were real and always had been.”

“To each his own way and his own prayer. God does not take us at our word. He looks deep into our hearts. It is not the ceremonies or rituals that make a difference, but whether our hearts are sufficiently pure or not.“

“Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart”

It’s compelling.
Like you can’t leave alone a scab.
Like you need to know what happens next.

“For in hot countries people are almost all violent and passionate”
lol.

Chilling and compelling - at the same time.
Like when you know there are right and wrong sides to driving and are knowingly driving on the wrong side.
And you furtively wonder if anyone else has noticed that you are in error.

"The colonial era is over. And yet, residual problems [...] the result of untidy departures by colonial power, still remain dangerously stalemated [...] chronic hostility between India and Pakistan [...] is the most obvious example [,,,] making the imperial era compellingly current once more."

I came to this book for the romance. But then I grew to appreciate birdwatching. It looks like I will be leaving the book [unread] because of the romance 🤷🏻‍♀️

“… the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.”

“… the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.”

“As we have seen, English histories and theoretical constructs of India not only promoted divide et impera by inventing the religious ‘periodization’ of the Indian past, but portrayed a nation waiting for the civilizing advent of British rule.”

“… forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest”

Mittal quotes a judgement regarding the punishment of being put in stocks: “In the case of Shanars …. regard themselves degraded by the infliction of such punishment.” For the same crime, a person’s punishment is decided by whether or not their pride/public image could handle it. The situation is a lot closer to present day than you might think.

Fortune unhealing. Huntsman without the strength.

“.. she could let them [requests] hover forever in ambiguity, in that space where she was neither accepted nor rejected. If she never asked, she wouldn’t have to face the possibility of a terrible answer.”

“We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill”

“ she called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.”

Kya looked at her toes. Why should the injured, the still bleeding, bear the onus of forgiveness? She didn’t answer.

The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired—life—was not what I was confident about—death.

“I felt that pull, the longing of a frightened girl.”

Alina: “He just blooms wherever he’s planted”
Tamar: “And you?”
Alina: “I’m more of a weed”

“I couldn’t write in Korean; I’d never been taught how.
Could Korean thoughts be written in Japanese?”

“With every creature that vanishes [extinct], we lose a way of making sense of the world”