Quotes from Thrity Umrigar

So, in the end, I hoped that this novel would be judged by the same criteria that all novels should be judged by: Are the characters memorable? Is the story line credible? And does the novel help soften our hearts a little, does it induce in us feelings of compassion and empathy, does it make us understand something about human behavior in all its mysterious, even contradictory, glory?

So this is how history gets rewritten, she thought. This is how it begins, with exaltation. Now it is not enough for a man merely to have been a man; now the etiquette of grief demands that we change him into a prince, a king. Now the flaws of a man have to be ironed out like creases in a suit, until he is spread out before us as smooth and unblemished as the day he was born.

I am not ascare to die. I am only ascare that after death I be alone. Maybe because of suicide, I go to the hell? If hell all hot and crowded and noiseful, like Christian minister on TV say, then I not care because it will be just like India. But if hell cold and quiet, with lot of snow and leaf-empty trees, and people who smile with string-thin lips, then I ascare. Because it seems so much like my life in Am'rica.

But what she is experiencing here, in the woods, is more than memory. It is feeling, sensation. She feels Parvati in the tranquility of the blue sky. She feels her in the dancing treetops. In each of the submerged stones. In

They had all worked so hard to forget what they'd left behind and to build a new life in America.

This randomness makes her feel like vapor, someone inconsequential and invisible.

Ma wrong about one thing. When I was girl, she only talk about love in the marriage. [...] Nobody tell me what make real marriage--respect.

knitted sweater of muscle and bone and nerve endings—would

Two things make us do bad things in life - fear and pride.