Durga Chew-Bose Quotes

#1. A nook person finds the dog at the party; drinks wine from a mug; sits on the floor and braids carpet tassels only to become self-conscious and unbraid them.

Durga Chew-Bose

#2. Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment. Letting form pass through you.

Durga Chew-Bose

#3. Memory is trust open to doubt. Perhaps

Durga Chew-Bose

#4. The genius of the word is that it's more of an expression than a word. Nook

Durga Chew-Bose

#5. A woman carries her inner life - lugs it around or holds it in like 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.

Durga Chew-Bose

#6. Is there something to be learned from fast tenderness that wanes just as fast as it forms?

Durga Chew-Bose

#7. Nook people are those of us who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room.

Durga Chew-Bose

#8. Nook people express appreciation in the moment by maintaining how much we will miss what is presently happening. Our priorities are spectacularly disordered. A nook person might spend the last few years of her twenties thinking she is dying. Convinced of it. Nook

Durga Chew-Bose

#9. To this day, watching a woman mindlessly tend to one thing while doing something else absorbs me. Like securing the backs of her earrings while wiggling her feet into her shoes. Like staring into some middle distance, where lines soften, and where she separates the relevant from the immaterial.

Durga Chew-Bose

#10. Even when I was nothing, I was arriving. This

Durga Chew-Bose

#11. Then again, maybe that's why I'm drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities. Before

Durga Chew-Bose

#12. Isn't it fun to read a sentence that races ahead of itself?

Durga Chew-Bose

#13. Memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. Memory isn't a well but an offshoot. It goes secretly. Comes apart. Deceives. It's guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you've emotionalized. And

Durga Chew-Bose

#14. Writing is losing focus and winning it back, only to lose it once more.

Durga Chew-Bose

#15. Change, I've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable.

Durga Chew-Bose

#16. No matter how lackluster its surroundings, within seconds, all was new again for a goldfish because it had figured out how to repair its sense of spectacle. There

Durga Chew-Bose

#17. Because there is trust too, in feeling small.

Durga Chew-Bose

#18. I find the plainness and economizing record of materials handled calming. Realistic yet not austere, because what corresponds - the words oil on canvas - has everything and nothing to do with what I'm looking at.

Durga Chew-Bose

#19. Women who are in no rush to respond to a world that's only conceived them as its consequence.

Durga Chew-Bose

#20. They experienced the world, I supposed, as I experienced going to the movies: that flash of amazement petitioned, in part, from feeling small in the presence of bigness.

Durga Chew-Bose

#21. The sheer, ensorcelled panic of feeling moved.

Durga Chew-Bose

#22. And besides, it feels more covert to have no evidence. To believe that something you've experienced will build on your extent - your extent as a person who sees things, and is moved by things - without ever having to prove those things happened exactly as they happened.

Durga Chew-Bose

#23. Parents who experience pause from "the unnecessary beauty of an ice storm coating trees," while their kids - who "bewilder well," she writes - are simply looking for something to throw.

Durga Chew-Bose

#24. The whole Esther Williams of it all. The ostrich ballet. Like pirouetting feather dusters; their paddle feet in fourth position.

Durga Chew-Bose