Top 17 Nayomi Munaweera Quotes

#1. They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succour. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #1649
#2. Yet there are moments when I feel a continent apart, when their belonging seems easy and unforced and my own is only pantomime.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #34670
#3. It was something I learned then. That you could take the crumpled remains of something destroyed and smooth them into newness. You could pretend certain things weren't happening even if you had seen or felt them. Everything done can be denied.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #155877
#4. The sway in Mala's waist, the curve of her hip beneath the folds of her sari, have caught the eye of many young men, each of whom is secretly willing to denounce the colonial prejudice of skin color by falling in love with her.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #243989
#5. There is silence and then the familiar smack of Beatrice Muriel's palm against her forehead. "A love marriage," she says. In her opinion, love marriages border on the indecent. They signify a breakdown of propriety, a giving in to the base instincts exhibited by the lower castes and foreigners.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #293778
#6. Leaving is an act that cannot be undone.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #766518
#7. We play hide-and-seek, wade into her ponds to fill jam jars with writhing tadpoles, and cavort with her pack of dogs, named Brandy, Whiskey, Lager, so that just calling the pack makes one feel light-headed and drunk.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #822291
#8. Those less fortunate eat dried fish while the truly destitute fight with the spiny shells of crabs or lobsters. Decades later, my father will find it incomprehensible that Americans crave what in his childhood was considered repugnant fare.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #980331
#9. On a fulcrum in my chest, grief and relief are balanced in equal measure.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #1005605
#10. Then too, motherhood is broken because in this place, to be a good mother is to give yourself completely. It is to erase yourself. This is what I refused to do.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #1201954
#11. She's Tamil. That's enough. They take our land, our jobs. If we let them they will take the whole country.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #1233709
#12. Three years after my birth, my mother swells again. When Lanka is born and brought home, Shiva and I gaze over the edge of the bassinet at this strange, alien creature and claim her as our own. We are a threesome from then on. Joined at the hip. A pyramid. A triangle.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #1238903
#13. I lie there in the magic grove, being hummed at by trees with ancient memories, lulled by their stately breath, held in the embrace of their roots.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #1447698
#14. When a bone breaks, it heals stronger in the cracks. I realize this is what is happening to her heart.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #1535196
#15. Whole generations of students were blown off their life courses, rendered jobless, unmoored by direction or occupation. My father raged about the incessant closing of the university.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #1592238
#16. This is the beginning of what we will come to call the Upstairs-Downstairs, Linga-Singha wars.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #1725388
#17. We have learned not to care about the state of that other place even as it burns or drowns.

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera Quotes #1759797

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