Burnt Sugar Quotes
"I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure."
"The sympathy she elicits in others gives rise to something acrid in me."
"Human degeneration halts and sputters but doesn’t reverse."
"I cannot believe that any child of mine could have such bad handwriting."
"It must be the worst kind of suffering – cognizance of one’s own collapse, the penance of watching as things slip away."
"My mother was a woman who could memorize recipes she had only read once."
"Sometimes, I refer to Ma in the past tense even though she is still alive."
"I wish India allowed for assisted suicide like the Netherlands. Not just for the dignity of the patient, but for everyone involved."
"Sometimes I cry when no one else is around – I am grieving, but it’s too early to burn the body."
"The most diabolical part is the second hand, which, like a witching wand, is the only part of the clock that moves."
"For a time, I wanted to emulate [my mother's] quality; it seemed like the one useful trait she had."
"I repeated my mother’s story when I was questioned again later. I had not yet learned what dissent was."
"The spell is broken. The child does not know what is real or what can be counted on."
"I wish moderation were a comfortable state."
"I grew up in a time of landlines and Swatch watches and have my own collections stored away."
"The idea doesn’t sit well with me and I ask him about cross-contamination."
"My art is about collecting data, information, finding irregularities."
"A diary sounds so trifling, so ridiculously childlike."
"You should worry about your own madness instead of mine."
"Pictures do not record history. They decide history. If there are no pictures of you, you never existed."
"The world exists only as far as you can see."
"Being together or apart was independent from wanting and happiness."
"What’s the point of always looking at blank white?"
"The truth is, I hate it here. I always have."
"How can she live with us? How can we let this hideous creature poison our home?"
"I have to explain when people ask me, and I don’t know what to say. I feel ashamed."
"I wonder how I will love Ma when she is at the end."
"You have so much here already. And you haven’t even had children yet."
"I’m telling you. Have you asked her? She will tell you."
"The time you added chilli to Antara’s khichdi."
"I think, eventually, Ma has to live with us."
"My earliest memory is of a giant in a pyramid."
"I didn’t understand what was non-violent about pulling hair out of your scalp."
"I have been researching. This is what I’ve found so far."
"Sometimes we took her cigarette downstairs. We walked past the dilapidated hotel, the one Nana owned and ran, with its art deco facade and peeling paint job."
"Ma wasn’t well after the ashram. No one could deny it, but no one could tell me what this meant."
"Nani held my gaze for a long time before allowing her lips to curve into a smile. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it does not.’"
"I began to recognize the chaos inside my mother, to see how unlike her I was."
"However simple the problem, and however clean the solution, there is always a remainder, a fraction of something said and misconstrued."
"The world seemed forcefully, endlessly angry with me."
"At the end, she will be a house I’ve moved out of, containing nothing that is familiar."
"Reza wanted to know what things felt like from the inside."
"I imagined life pulsating beneath the brown parchment of skin."
"I sank into my mother’s arms, feeling the skin around her stomach through her kurta."
"In my stomach, you were smaller than one of those grains of sand."
"Sometimes my mother would come to my room at night, slip into the bed beside me and press her cold feet against mine."
"Things were always changing, and I was only as good as my physical appeal, which would disappear, as hers had."
"Those teenage years were the closest I came to hating her."
"The world was changing, he had known it before anyone else – in the future, violence would be captured in its sharpest details."
"I always wondered what my mother loved so much about him, and why she continues to love him."
"I had the distinct feeling that she was pleased to tell me these things, to know that I would suffer as she had."
"When I look back on those days, I wonder did she ever see me as a child she wanted to protect?"
"I remember being surprised when Reza left us, surprised by how deeply we had soaked him up and how completely he then evaporated."
"Sometimes I think Ma started deteriorating after that day."
"I don’t want to die. Not here. Not with this song filling the air. I can’t breathe and I have to get out. I must get out."