Rakesh Satyal > Quotes

“Books are much better companions to me than people.”
― Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy

“I have discovered that we do not hold our sexuality but our sexuality holds us.”
― Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy

“I live in a kingdom of one.”
― Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy

“If you had the capacity to shove love into a princess or fury into a winged monster, you had the capacity to generate passion or mirth or humility or patience in yourself. It wasn't just pen to paper or fingers on a keyboard. It was through your own generosity of imagination that you made yourself good.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“That was what writing really was—an excuse to gild your loneliness until it resembled the companionship of others.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“I often think that being a woman in this world must feel like waking up every day to find that someone deleted what you wrote the day before.”
― Rakesh Satyal

“when time is tomorrow but still carries a strain of today, when we are wiser and reborn all at once.”
― Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy

“It's like picking up a piece of writing from years ago. You feel the tiniest stab of recollection when you discover it, but mostly you are in awe of how it was you who wrote down these words and felt something so creative in that moment.”
― Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy

“Courage is an imaginary construct that people have made to hide their inferiority.”
― Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy

“Sometimes we are so consumed by the flame, burning so painfully in its heat, that we can't see the utter gorgeousness of the fire.”
― Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy

“But what does that mean?”
― Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy

“Dough is like an Indian mother's stress ball. Squeeze, roll.”
― Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy

“The sky will soon lighten as it always does, and there is no more hopeful moment that that: when time is tomorrow but still carries a strain of today, when we're wiser and reborn all at once.”
― Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy

“Had he ever really envisioned a life in which he could find love? He wasn’t sure that he was capable of being intimate with anyone. It was one thing to espouse a feeling, an idea of companionship. But it was another thing entirely to imagine a life that was informed by the presence of another person and that person’s affection.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“The greatest skill that an author could possess, she thought, was the ability to make a reader see a book as his or her child, someone only the reader in question could truly appreciate, love, and protect.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“It was self-consciousness that aged you,”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“To be fair, the spare tire around Mohan’s torso was due to her own reticence toward him. They were getting fatter in their sexual sadness.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“the staid dowagers who sat guard at every Indian get-together—white-bunned, cardigan-clad women with hands like gathered rope, nodding their approval or assent when necessary, reminders that every adult in the room was nothing more than an aged child.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“That was what a person was—a curio cabinet of experiences.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“AS YOUR BODY AGES it acquires new sensations, very few of which are actually pleasant.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“He realized that in any group of three there were always two people against a third. Better to be part of the winning team.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“STEFANIE HAD WRITTEN A SECTION containing as many adverbs as it did mermaid scales,”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“The real danger of an insult, even in sleep, was that it put into slurs what you pin into poetry in order to protect yourself.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“He wasn’t actually sure if these attempts to be cool had to do with (a) the inherent habits of women, (b) the inherent habits of Indian women, or (c) the inherent habits of his mother, but it was clear that she was having some sort of midlife crisis.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“Nothing envisioned a future more inaccurately than naivete.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“Americans wrongly assumed that all Indians were the “victims” of arranged marriage—and his parents’ marriage had certainly been arranged—but marriages these days weren’t so much arranged as urged, like marriages out of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Henry James: a series of social conveniences that capitalized on people’s proximity to each other.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“The palpable sense that she would likely never know what it felt like to live simply, now that every moment was overwhelming”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“know I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I do know one big thing: being cheery, even when you’re not feeling cheery, even when you actually feel like walking into traffic from being so sad, brings cheer into your life somehow. I’m smart because I know that.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“Alongside his day-to-day life, there had been a constant assumption that he could go back and take up the life that he had always wanted. In other words, he was in the habit of living a version of his life, all the while forgetting that there were no other versions but the one life itself. Trying to go back and correct what he saw as the mistakes of his life was not merely implausible; it was impossible.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name

“It was through your own generosity of imagination that you made yourself good.”
― Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name