7 Quotes by Durga Chew-Bose

And in those moments when the two of them are playing dead, I quietly climb back upstairs because, as time passes and as I spot my parents doing young, lighthearted things, I'm overrun by some cruel and preoccupying sense that I'm watching the memory of them.

What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I've only experienced through photos, visits, food. It's not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.

A woman carries her inner life - lugs it around or holds it in fumes that both poison and bless her - while nourishing another's inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind.

Sick for my body before. Before I’d ever noticed I was in possession of one. Before fulllengths. Before I knew anything about valleyed collarbones, a stomach’s folds, smooth legs, small wrists.

I’ll believe anything because I want to understand, yet understanding can sometimes organize itself like a series of false starts.

Women [who are] sick with anitch, dissatisfied to the point of dancing alone in their homes to music that isn’t so much music but dull pain with a tune. Women with demands that are mysterious even to themselves. Women who are runaways in their own kitchens. Women who are in no rush to respond to a world that’s only conceived them as its consequence. Who experience deep movement by playing air piano. Who are wind-oriented.

Tell a woman she is beautiful, and she might—it’s very possible—feellike a fool. Roses die quick. They will do.The girl you want does not exist.The girl you want does exist.But not like that. And not like that. Or like that. Or like that.She is sitting across from you, looking just beyond you—at herself.