Quotes About Reflection

No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.

Regret... when it comes to you, I have oceans of it.

I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her.

What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.

After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.

I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

I guess some stories do not need telling.

She considers for a minute before saying, I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that. I should have been more kind.

She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me.

That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

But even when he wasn't around, he was.

You know the old bit, he said. You're on a deserted island. You can have five books. Which do you choose? I never thought I'd actually have to.

A life lived from the back seat, observed as it blured by. An indifferent life.

In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality.

You are lucky. How so? To know where you came from. I guess I never gave it much thought.: Bah, of course not. But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person.

But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.

Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories.

He was a visionary or a fool I have found the line perilously thin myself

I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I'd always feared they would.

The moment is brief, barely enough for a flutter of the pulse but long enough for her illusory self to catch up with the reality of the woman gazing back from the shopwindow. It is a little devastating. This is what ageing is, she thinks as she follows Isabelle into the store, these random unkind moments that catch you when you least expect them.

Thinking of the anguish of his final days and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes everything I have done, everything I want to do, seem as unsubstantial as the little vows you make yourself as you're going to sleep, the ones you've already forgotten by the time you wake up.