The Sleepwalker's Guide To Dancing Quotes
"For one, it cut down on her visits. ('I never get warm here!' Kamala made a point of saying the few times she did come, rubbing her hands together and looking around suspiciously.)"
"Cooking was a talent of her mother’s that Amina often thought of as evolutionary, a way for Kamala to survive herself with friendships intact."
"To live in the Eapens’ house was to acknowledge the sharpness of invisible borders, the separations that had divided it like two countries since 1983."
"There are choices, Amina! Choices we make as human beings on this planet Earth."
"Amina sighed. Had she known that leaving her copy of Rolling Stone in the bathroom on her last visit would make Kamala a self-proclaimed expert on all things Seattle, she might have been more careful."
"Wrapped in a bulky dhobi and skinny as ever, Babu smiled a toothless smile, his resemblance to a malnourished baby belying his ability to toss large objects onto his head and carry them through crowds."
"Sunil fixed a blazing smile on Kamala. 'Lovely as a rose, my dear!' He bestowed cologney kisses on her cheek and then Amina’s before turning and clutching his heart."
"The house, for its part, had not changed at all, its two stories painted pink and yellow and slanting in the heat like a melting birthday cake."
"'And what was there to fear from the sunlight that dappled the Salem train station the morning of their arrival, making everything—the packed luggage and the red-shirted coolies and even the beggars—seem sweet and full of promise?'"
"Amina opened her eyes to the muggy dark. The pool. Tomorrow she would be crawling through the clear turquoise while light dappled the walls around her."
"People need to grow apart sometimes to grow back together, you know."
"You think that changing and changing and changing ourselves to fit in with these people is some good thing?"
"Everyone is saying our birthright is the land. Our birthright is to live!"
"But when you have money and it goes? Then it feels worse."
"Because I needed to see it. After all these years, I needed to see what it looks like to fall that far down!"
"Not ridiculous, well behaved! Amina and Akhil are names of good children!"
"I’m all out of love," she whispered to them now.
"Someone who stands up for what he believes in. Does his duty."
"You know, you’re going to have to speak eventually."
"One person’s good man is another person’s, you know, dad."
"Don’t give me that look. Kam, I told you I would try, I didn’t promise."
"It’s such a crucial business, this liking what you do."
"You find the thing you love the most, and time will stop for you to love it."
"It keeps them from getting into the trash. And by keeping it in the truck, we can move when they do."
"It’s just an old man’s disease. Nothing more."
"Everyone gets depressed, Ma," Amina said, her face warming. "And it can definitely affect your perceptions."
"I didn’t mean to," she said. "Or, at least, I didn’t think it would be such a long time. I just took a picture... some pictures... they were hard for me."
"So it seemed like the right time," he was saying now, wrapping up the trajectory of his last twelve years.
"Oh, no! We’re not! I just, uh, I wasn’t thinking that, actually, I just…" He shut the trunk, walking quickly away.
"Are you sure this isn’t a date? Because you sound nervous."
"I know." Mindy sighed. "It’s totally fucking weird."
"So what does it mean, you’re on a break from photojournalism? Was it a planned thing?"
"We are all we have here. Do you understand? That is it. And we can all talk about old times and Campa Cola and wouldn’t it be nice if we could go back, but none of us ever want to go back."
"It felt like years since Amina had even thought about the Seattle socialite."
"Occasional slash accidental colon, documenting the everyday tragedy."
"It’s just an assumption. I mean, let’s say this show goes up and absolutely nothing bad happens to the business. Do you still feel like shit?"
"Because you secretly wish other people could see them? Because I know that. It seems pretty obvious, actually."
"They’re fucking good. They’re your best work."
"It felt like eating or fucking or otherwise having the right thing go in the right place. It felt primordially good."
"No thinking! Amina Eapen, you listen to me, okay? We are home already, like it or not, and that’s how we … Your parents, they welcomed us, no?"
"I’m sorry I didn’t call you this week. I got your messages and all this stuff was going down and I just wanted to get some of it sorted before I talked to you."
"I mean, what, so now it’s some kind of dictatorship? Ninjas?"
"I mean, what did they win, really? So I’m going to end up with a Suriani guy. Sajeev, of all people. So what."
"I mean, you paid to go to school there for, like, years! And they treat you like a criminal?"
"I’ve been smelling something burning for the past few days."
"It’s hard to have that much love looking at you in the face at one time and not feel like an asshole."
"So this was it? Thirty years of no one getting a word in edgewise, and they’d run out of things to say?"
"Joy blossomed across his face, filling his cheeks and eyes with an intensity not seen since he had performed his last surgery."
"But when? That day, as Thomas’s voice went from hoarse to ragged, as his lips dried into twin strips of beef jerky and the sun dawdled across the sky, Amina paced the field, unable to sit next to her father or to let him out of her sight."
"Whether Thomas registered Monica at all was debatable, his voice reduced to an occasional grunt, but Amina watched through the window as her father’s physician’s assistant wept, holding on to his hand, kissing his forehead as she stood up."
"Chacko held his face between his hands like he was trying to carve it into his own memory, and Thomas looked at him, blinking."