Quotes from Meera Syal

Choosing whom you love is the most political decision you can make.

Maybe that's what love meant, both people thinking they were the lucky one.

Life isn't all haha hehe.

But tonight I finally made the connection that change always strolled hand in hand with loss, with upheaval, and that I would always feel it keenly because in the end, I did not live under the same sky as most other people. (p179)

I am the genuine article, therefore I don't have to try. I just have to be. You, on the other hand, have to try any passing bandwagon, because what else have you got?

Maybe that's what love meant, both people thinking they were the lucky one.

Every path leads to the same god.

attack being the best form of defence, and never ever show that you might be in pain. That would only invite more violence because pity was for wimps and wimps could not survive round here

no one wanted to think about the gangs of no-hope teenagers who already took over the nearby park all day, drinking lager and waiting for something to happen to them, trapped in a forgotten village in no-man's land between a ten-shop town and an amorphous industrial sprawl.

I had seen how in an instant, those you called friends could suddenly become tormentors, sniffing out a weakness or a difference, turning their own fear of ostracism into a weapon with which they could beat the victim away, afraid that being an outsider, and individual even, was somehow infectious.

But I've always been a sucker for a good double entendre; the gap between what is said and what is thought, what is stated and what is implied, is a place in which I have always found myself. I'm really not a liar, I just learned very early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong.(p10)

Only tiny kindnesses, but the ones that counted, the million little mercies we take for granted, the mundane gestures that keep us, tentatively, together.

that you didn't work just for the money, you worked for the freedom work gave you, for the chance to be a stronger, more interesting version of yourself.