The Inheritance Of Loss Quotes
"Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself."
"No human had ever seen an adult giant squid alive, and though they had eyes as big as apples to scope the dark of the ocean, theirs was a solitude so profound they might never encounter another of their tribe."
"The melancholy of this situation washed over Sai."
"It was an awful thing, the downing of a proud man. He might kill the witness."
"The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow."
"They considered themselves uniquely positioned to lecture everyone on a variety of topics: accounting professors on accounting, Vermonters on the fall foliage, Indians on America, Americans on India, Indians on India, Americans on America."
"The shadows drew in close, the night chomped more than its share of hours."
"The ice cracked loudly into pieces, and within the contours of this gray, broken river it seemed as if the city’s inhabitants were being provided with a glimpse of something far and forlorn."
"But even this did not seem to help, and once, on his bicycle, he began to weep from the cold."
"The streets were empty but for the homeless man who stood looking at an invisible watch on his wrist while talking into a dead pay phone."
"Women in baby-doll dresses, ribbons, and bows indulged themselves with the first fiddleheads of the season."
"In Stone Town they ate samosas and chapatis, jalebis, pilau rice."
"The cook urged his customers to keep some chhang near their beds in case they felt thirsty at night, claiming it gave strength after illness."
"He had found that there was nothing so awful as being in the service of a family you couldn’t be proud of."
"Every bit of him filled with a burning sensation. It roiled within until he could barely stand it."
"His mother was a phantom in the dark courtyard, pouring cold well water over his invisible self."
"Sometimes, when his father saw him, he forgot to recognize his son, so clearly in the X-ray flashes of his imagination did he see the fertile cauliflowers within his son’s skull."
"He realized truth was best looked at in tiny aggregates, for many baby truths could yet add up to one big size unsavory lie."
"The countryside was full of game; quail and partridge with lines of babies strung out behind whirred by like nursery toys."
"The cook had begun working at ten years old, at a salary half his age, five rupees, as the lowest all-purpose chokra boy in the kitchen of a club."
"The cook found himself telling lies. Mostly about the past since the present could too easily be picked apart."
"The entire package was prayed over and thumb-printed red and yellow with tika marks."
"He experienced the profound silence that could come only after violence."
"The cook had never had love at all. She had never sat in a hushed room and talked about such things as might make your soul tremble like a candle."
"Books were making her restless. She was beginning to read, faster, more, until she was inside the narrative and the narrative inside her."
"He walked to where the green ran out into a tail of pilings and where men like himself often sat on the rocks and looked out onto a dull stretch of New Jersey."
"The sweetest fruit in all of Stone Town grew in the graveyard, and the finest bananas grew from the grandfather’s grave."
"I can always tell. I’ve always been very sensitive. You know how I am—the princess and the pea."
"Little pearl," said the judge when Sai left, in case Mutt’s feelings had been bruised.
"Ooof ho. Look what you’ve done." Little burrowing insects ran free and overexcitedly on the floor and walls.
"Stupid fool," he said to his granddaughter. "Shut the door!"
"Don’t be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog. It’s just rain."
"The world vanished, the gate opened onto nothing—no Gyan around the bend of the mountain—and that terrible feeling of waiting released its stranglehold."
"Sai had always been calm and cheerful during these months, the only time when her life in Kalimpong was granted perfect sense."
"Our darling Piu," an obituary outlined in black had a photo of a smiling child—"Seven years have passed since you left for your heavenly abode, and the pain has not gone."
"Where the head is held high, Where knowledge is free, Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls …. Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let me and my country awake."
"But either her behind was left vulnerable, or her nose, and she was frightened by the wind making ghost sounds in the empty soda bottles: whoo hoooo hooo."
"It angered him for reasons beyond Mutt’s unhappiness; it made a mockery of him, his ideals."
"As he heard others shuffling outside, waiting for their turn, he stuck a finger up the hole and excavated within, allowing a backed up load of scropulated goat pellets to rattle down loudly."
"Not the first position, nor the second. But there he was."
"All four inhabitants lay awake as outside the rain and wind whooshed and banged, the trees heaved and sighed, and the lightning shamelessly unzipped the sky over Cho Oyu."
"India for Indians. No taxation without representation. No help for the wars. Not a man, not a rupee. British Raj Murdabad!"
"We are laborers on the tea plantations, coolies dragging heavy loads, soldiers."
"India or England, they never had cause to doubt our loyalty."
"We must fight, brothers and sisters, to manage our own affairs."
"We will defend our own homeland. This is where we were born, where our parents were born, where our grandparents were born."
"You are like slaves, that’s what you are, running after the West, embarrassing yourself."
"Old hatreds...found the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before."
"Justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed."
"Looking back you do not find what you left behind."
"When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you."
"Perhaps he had made a mistake in cutting off his daughter … he’d condemned her before he knew her."
"This granddaughter whom he didn’t hate was perhaps the only miracle fate had thrown his way."
"Men with guns rested in the ladies’ powder room, enjoyed the spacious plumbing that was still stamped BARHEAD SCOTLAND, PATENTEES in mulberry letters."
"Then, when it was all over, and the men had signed a peace treaty and moved out—they had staged a public surrender of arms."
"Sai could look after Mutt, he reasoned. The cook was growing decrepit."
"But Sai, it had turned out, was more his kin than he had thought imaginable."
"But could they feel as they did here? Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty-half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows."
"Every single contradiction history or opportunity might make available to them, every contradiction they were heir to, they desired."