Quotes from Gargi Bhattacharyya

Depressed heartbreak is rarely disruptive or demanding or loudly eccentric. Depressed heartbreak is like taking a step into death while looking like you have remembered how to behave. I think this tells us something about the half-deadness this world [under late capitalism] demands of us. Learning to go through the motions and not hope too much.

For a while I believe I am flying, not falling.

In common with other bookish types, I have always existed partly in the shadows. Skulked around the edges of things. Chosen quiet times and deserted places. Enjoyed the gloomy nooks and crannies of life. Maybe assumed that this was true for everyone and learned to have just enough of a daytime public face to pass, while I retreated into my own elsewhere. And this was something I always enjoyed: the ability to maintain a secret elsewhere life.

Every doctrine of violence and machinery of reaction has relied on his frightening it is to contemplate the crushing of hope. Far safer to expel hope altogether. More sensible than the painful un-numbing of imagining other possibilities.

The invention of the productive economy obscures the far longer history of social reproduction as the business of life.

You fear that every effort has been meaningless, but it touches so many others that we can never calculate the impact of our lives, and that impossibility of calculation is a retort to finitude.