Quotes About Connection

Is that what you think of when you think of me? Gogol asks him. Do I remind you of that night? Not at all, his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. You remind me of everything that followed.

Remember it always. Remember that you and I made this journey and went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.

It was only then, raising my water glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters for so many months.

Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect.

Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died...He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life...Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense.

She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.

As strange as it seemed, I knew in my heart that one day her death would affect me, and stranger still, that mine would affect her.

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.

Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear.

I just wanted to go home, to the language in which I was known, and loved.

In the days that follow, he begins to remember things about Moushumi, images that come to him without warning while he is sitting at his desk at work, or during a meeting, or drifting off to sleep, or standing in the mornings under the shower. They are scenes he has carried within him, buried but intact, scenes he has never thought about or had reason to conjure up until now.

I think that translating is the most profound, most intimate way of reading. A translation is a wonderful, dynamic encounter between two languages, two texts, two writers. It entails a doubling, a renewal....It was a way of getting close to different languages, of feeling connected to writers very distant from me in space and time.

Odd things made him love her.

avevo bisogno di una lingua differente: una lingua che fosse un luogo di affetto e di riflessione. —ANTONIO TABUCCHI

It made him shy, they way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror.

He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born.

The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol. "For Gogol Ganguli," it says on the front endpaper in his father's tranquil hand, in red ballpoint ink, the letters rising gradually, optimistically, on the diagonal toward the upper right-hand corner of the page. "The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name" is written within quotation marks.

Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.

He regretted only one thing: that he had not met her sooner, that he had not known her every day of his life.

For as grateful as she feels for the company of the Nandis and Dr. Gupta, these acquaintances are only substitutes for the people who really ought to be surrounding them. Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby's birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true.

Je crois que traduire est la façon la plus profonde, la plus intime de lire quelque chose. Une traduction est une magnifique rencontre dynamique entre deux langues, deux textes, deux écrivains. Elle implique un dédoublement, un renouveau.

I'm amazed at our impulse to express ourselves, explain ourselves, tell stories to one another.

The next time she visits her father she'll speak to him in English. Were her mother ever to stand before her, even if Bela could choose any language on earth in which to speak, she would have nothing to say. But no, that's not true. She remains in constant communication with her. Everything in Bela's life has been a reaction. I am who I am, she would say, I live as I do because of you.