Sabrina > Recent Status Updates

"As soon as you begin rejecting a man, you have to be twice as polite. There's a danger between us but I'm not always sure who it belongs to. Which of us needs protection and which of us should be afraid?"

She's far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality- however messy- is far more comprehensible.

"Keiko, I'm so happy for you. You've been struggling for so long, but at last you've found someone who understands..."

She was getting carried away with making up a story for herself... If it had been that simple all along, I thought, I wish she'd given me clear instructions before, then I wouldn't have had to go to such lengths to find out how to be normal.

As manager #2 had told me, my hourly pay covered the basic requirement to condition my body so it was fit to take to work.

(2/2) What's this nonsense? ... For some guy who is no different than thousands of other men in this world? ... And you say to me 'love' and patience and sacrifice and if I don't marry him I will kill myself? If I can't talk to him I can't breathe and if I don't see him I can't live? What love, London? ... This is a man? This guy? ... Love, he said. Hah! I swear I thought you had some brains, London.

(1/2) Look here, Hanan said. This romance thing. With all due respect for love wherever it is, to lovers, songs, Nizar Qabbani's poetry, flowers, the moon, nights of conversation, stars, and every poet who has ever existed - this isn't big on rationality. No listening, no looking, no thinking or real planning... And then you say, I'm crazy about him? I can't live without him? He is my air and water, my sun and moon?

... she saw humiliation stamped in the very spot where desire still burned.

Every day and every night, for ten years, she died a little more. She breathed and ate and drank but she was dead. She spoke to people and walked among them, dead. Only much later did her body give up its already-deceased spirit, its dead spirit, no longer forced to pretend, to play at being alive.

"... [You should] feel happy as long as he's happy and sad when he is sad."

"So who feels any sadness when I am sad?" Mayya wondered.

... On every beat, a shudder of pain shot across my back, reminding me that as fast as I could run away, it was still going to hurt in the end.

A strange thing happens when someone dies far away. The brain does not process the information. The person keeps on living in another place for you, even though the other place is not on earth anymore.

She unwrapped the balloon’s silver string from her tiny wrist, hoping for a cathartic moment, a liberating flight, but the balloon had lost helium and gravitated in front of us. Even the wind couldn’t carry it away. It wouldn’t fly up and it wouldn’t lie down. It just lingered like a piece of bad news we did not know what to do with.

This body of grief is not fit for human habitation.

The reality being that they'd lost the plot somewhere along the way, their once great romance spun into a period piece, into an immigrant family story, and then into a story about two people trying to get by... Because they'd also, in the way old people often do, slipped gently into poverty.

Grandfather and Grandmother are careful, as he goes, not to weight his pack with their sorrow.

Simply by existing a child is delight.

"You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why."

“It’s a weird phrase in English, ‘in love’, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be ‘in’ anything else- in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.”

We study history... to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

(2/2) Since the biological distinctions between different groups of Homo sapiens are, in fact, negligible, biology can't explain the intricacies of Indian society or American racial dynamics. We can only understand those phenomena by studying the events, circumstances, and power relations that transformed figments of imagination into cruel- and very real- social structures.

(1/2) Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis- they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths. That is one good reason to study history. If the division into blacks and whites or Brahmins and Shudras was grounded in biological realities- that is, if Brahmins really had better brains than Shudras- biology would be sufficient for understanding human society.

Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimized by history are likely to be victimized yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.

Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? ... Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.

While the stars enter into their shining life up in heaven yonder: here is the chestnut tree: here is the bench at its old roots. Come, we will sit there in peace to-night, though we should never more be destined to sit there together.

There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.

But there was ever in Mr. Rochester (so at least I thought) such a wealth of the power of communicating happiness, that to taste but of the crumbs he scattered to stray and stranger birds like me was to feast genially.