Quotes from Thrity Umrigar

She felt grief move within her like a barefoot woman flitting through a dark house.

Maybe, in the end, that's all that love was—doing the hard thing. Not roses and valentines and walks on the beach, but simply being present, day after ordinary day. The extraordinary romanticism of ordinary life. But

As children, we were taught to be afraid of tigers and lions. Nobody taught us what I know today—the most dangerous animal in this world is a man with wounded pride.

But surely, she argued with herself, life was more than this relentless getting ahead? Surely, there was more to life than self-actualization and ambition and success? What was wrong with linking one's happiness to that of another human being? Why should fifty years of peak capitalism eradicate something that the Eastern philosophers had taught for thousands of years—that life is about interconnectedness, interdependence, and yes, even sacrifice?

Hope, thin as a thread, sharp as a fishing line, cut into David's heart." p. 79

Perhaps it is that, right now, she needs a man to help her navigate these murky waters that her thoughtless granddaughter has led them both into. Or perhaps it is that time doesn't heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all,

It was false, what everyone always said about tragedy. Tragedy wasn't not having someone to love. Tragedy was loving someone and not being able to express it.

What she and Serabai had built together, Viraf has destroyed. Women create, Bhima thinks, men destroy. The way of the world.

Living a principled life was as much about what you didn't do as what you did. That what you rejected defined you as much as what you embraced. The whole beauty of being broken up with someone was that you didn't have to reply.

But if Viraf had been unable to light her funeral pyre, she had done it for him. She had climbed on top of the neatly arranged pile of wood and lay down; she had lit the match that brought alive the flames that had devoured her. With her words she had birthed a fire that had scorched all of them. The fire had consumed her, turning her future and her dreams to ash;

Clients didn't value what they got for free. It was human nature to devalue what came too cheap or easy.

It is dark. But inside Bhima's heart, it is dawn.

In the presence of immortality—the endlessly churning sea, the plowed fields of the sky, the loose gypsy wind—the rest of her life feels absurdly, ridiculously mortal and transient. Transient as money, fragile as love. As ethereal and ready to pop as these balloons that are dancing in the wind.

After all, a girl's biggest asset is her virtue.

She thought of Mohan, standing at his lonely post outside the airport until her plane took off. Waiting, along with thousands of others, all of them choosing to do the hard, inconvenient thing. Why? Because that's what you did for your loved ones.

the sting of Maya's betrayal has salted the sting of an earlier betrayal.

She's been at his apartment in Brooklyn, complaining about his couch being covered in cat hair. Bryan had taken her face in his hands and said, " You know what your problem is, Smita? You focus on the cat hair. Try focusing on the cat. Perhaps that's what love was--an embrace of the commonplace? Perhaps that's where wisdom lay--in recognizing the grandeur of everyday domestic life?

Like a musician, the Pathan had learned how to make a song out of his loneliness. Like a magician, he had learned how to use sheer air to contort limp pieces of rubber into objects of happiness. Empty-handed, he had built a world.

time doesn't heal wounds at all,

what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper

a dozen funeral pyres were ablaze at the same time. Black smoke the color of despair rose from those pyres.

And yet, despite the daily violence, Tehmina had marveled at the intimate way in which this tiny family huddled together around a small stove for their evening meals, had witnessed Parvati laughing as she lovingly combed her daughter's long hair, had registered the panicked look in Krishna's eyes when Parvati had taken ill with typhoid fever. Reality was complicated; Themina knew that. India had taught her that lesson, over and over again.

Suddenly, he wanted all of them, wanted to gather them up—David and Delores, Juanita and Carine and Katherine, Uncle Connor and Brad—and place them in an orchestra that would play the music of his life. He wanted to leave out none of it—not the trombone, not the cello, not the cymbals or the violin. Synthesis. He needed a fusing together of all the strands of his life: past and present, black and white, poor and rich.

She would wait until she wandered around this room filled with people she knew and loved, until she had wished every last one of them a new year filled with hope and dreams and yearning. She would not wish any of them success or prosperity or wealth because the magic was in the dreaming. She knew that now. America had taught her that. How wise, to talk about the pursuit of happiness and not of happiness itself.