Quotes from Nell Freudenberger

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 casual frequency of American hugging.

American English was different from the language she'd learned at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, but she was lucky because George corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes.

I've never worked on quantum entanglement, which Einstein once dismissed as "spooky action at a distance." It's a real phenomenon, though, one that has less to do with communication than with a shared history that causes a pair of particles, even once they've been permanently separated, to behave as if they knew what each other was thinking.

Charlie and I both felt very adult that last year of college, very experienced: I think we believed that what we'd achieved academically was akin to growing up, rather than something we might have done in place of it.

I read this article about how you can have anything going on in your head, as long as it doesn't manifest itself. Like a reflection.' I waited for my sister to expand on that, but she remained quiet. 'LIke a reflection that's different from what's doing the reflecting,' I suggested.

Physicists know that if you and I are sitting in a room together, you exert a gravitational force on me. It's almost nothing-I can't feel it-but it's the same force that binds our planet to our star.

Why would some people attracted to what is unfamiliar and others tat what they knew. She thought It may to do how comfortable you are in your own life, how well you though you belong

Amina knew she was a different person in Bangla than she was English; she noticed the change every time she switched languages on the phone. She was older in English, and also less fastidious; she was the parent to her parents.

Was there a person who existed beneath languages?

Amina couldn't imagine what it would be like not to remember your own mother; there had been no one to tell him, through looks and touch and angry scoldings, that he was the most precious person in the world to her.

She had believed that she'd been born with a soul whose thoughts were in no particular dialect, and she'd imagined that, when she married, her husband would be able to recognize this deep part of herself.

Her whole body was tired, but her mind had the jangly, wakeful feeling that sometimes came over her when she was lying in bed at night in Rochester.

Cheating means something though," she said. "Americans are obsessed with it." "Americans in particular?" "I think they worry about it more—so it happens more.

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.

One clue is that in pseudoscience, every piece fits neatly inside a theory and the scientist is never wrong.

Her mother had always seen things that other people couldn't; she was especially susceptible to ghosts and jinnis, who had appeared to her ever since she was a child.