Quotes from Nell Freudenberger

It was possible to be struck dumb by all sorts of emotions, not only surprise, and as they drove back toward Pittsford, Amina thought that there ought to be a whole set of words to encompass all those different varieties of silence.

What a strange thing, she thought, to find out one day that you had built your whole life on a mistake, and the next to discover that this fact would allow you to have your dearest wish.

Once again she had the disorientating feeling that her past was still happening, unfolding in a parallel stream right alongside her present.

If her father was Thunder, then George was Smoke - and how could you argue with someone who began to disappear as soon as you opened your mouth?

There were a lot of other things about village life she thought might surprise her new friend, but she didn't want to undermine Kim's admiration for her culture, which she thought was genuine if not especially well informed.

Now here was an American tragedy, and as sorry as she felt for Kim, who had lost both a husband and a child, there was a part of her that was secretly thrilled. Of all the people Kim might have told, she had chosen Amina.

We complain and complain in the villages, and then take us out and it's all we can talk about. Aren't people that way everywhere: Amina said. I mean, when they lose something?

If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.

He didn't understand how sadness came so easily to people. For him it was like a pile of rocks that had to be moved one at a time. Just thinking about it made him tired.

It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

Men she thought, could make a clean break with a woman, could leave in the way Parveen's husband had. Or could even be left, like George and determine to make a life another way. It was women who longed to retain ties and connections, to mix things up in complicated ways.

People lived their lives, carelessly dropping information as if it were trash. The writer moved behind them like a ragpicker. She cleaned and separated their garbage, culled and collected it.

I think that with most of our friends we choose how much of ourselves to reveal, and with a very select few it feels as if there is no choice.

I think we believed that what we'd achieved acamically was akin to growing up, rather than something we might have done in place of it.

We now know that our universe is almost certainly 13.77 billion years old, and that it expanded more than a trillion trillion times in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of its life.

I had an uncomfortable feeling I sometimes get in conversation with another person, as if the fundamental part of myself had evaporated-not in the sense of being gone, but as if it has undergone a phase transition and is hovering over my actual body as a vapor. That's the best I can describe it, as if my consciousness and my physical person are suddenly separated.

Years had passed, but we were still arguing about the same stuff. These patterns repeat themselves, with parents and children—that's another reason I went to India. If I was going to have a family, I wanted it to be totally different from the one I'd had.

Fariq took the phone without asking and redialed the number, as if her difficulty might be the result of general female incompetence

But Amina couldn't stand to look. It wasn't that George was old but that he felt sorry for himself that drove her crazy. If her father was Thunder, then George was Smoke—and how could you argue with someone who began to disappear as soon as you opened your mouth?

She nodded, concealing her emotion because she thought Kim might try to hug her again, and she was never going to get used to the

it was something harder to describe than that. We were on each other's side in a way that felt permanent, and so it hurt more than it might have otherwise, when she decided to shut me out.