The sunlight on her hair.
He felt the chill of her secrecy, numbing him, like a poison spreading quickly through his veins.
Certain creatures laid eggs that were able to endure the dry season. Others survived by burying themselves in mud, simulating death, waiting for the return of rain.
So that she began to see herself more clearly, as a thin film of dust was wiped from a sheet of glass.
She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.
What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.
Again, as it was after Udayan’s death, there was an acute awareness of time, of the future looming, accelerating. The baby’s lifetime, so scant, already outdistancing and outpacing her own. This was the logic of parenthood.
That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing.
And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she made.
That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.
Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.
The thought of Christmas overwhelms him. He no longer looks forward to the holiday; he wants only to be on the other side of the season. His impatience makes him feel that he is incontrovertibly, finally, an adult.
It is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.
It didn’t matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.
Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.
She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember.
Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.