Priya Parmar Quotes

• “I am not waiting. I am not waiting for anyone any more. It was me I was waiting for.”

  Priya Parmar

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• “A family is a messy unwieldy thing bounded only by blood andbeneath all the embarrassmentaffection.”

  Priya Parmar

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• “The rest of us are still living on the borrowed fuel of potential and so far have not left deep footprints. But together we carry a brackish air of importance. As if we are doing something worthy in the world. Maybe how we live our lives is the grand experiment? Mixing company, throwing out customs, using first names, waiting to marry, ignoring the rules, and choosing what to care about. Is that why we matter? Or perhaps Miss Warre-Cornish is right and we do not matter in the least.”

  Priya Parmar

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• “Duncan’s hands are long and soft, with a small, neat callus on his thumb from holding a brush—the painter’s hallmark. I felt it when he shook my hand.”

  Priya Parmar

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• “I reached out my hand to her. She had been there at the table, this sad, kind, talented woman. She had heard everything, but had been unable to speak to us.”

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• “Stay on the right side of They.”

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• “How I should have raised all her terrible destruction to the surface like a shipwrecked boat dredged up from the sea floor. But that would have given the fracture a shape, a dimension--a definite perimeter to the ruin. This way has a subtle cruelty. This way will torment. She will spend years trying to map the rift she caused and sound the damage. She will push on the bruise and grow frantic trying to repair the creeping remoteness. It is the unkindest thing I have ever done. And I will not relent. I will not do otherwise.”

  Priya Parmar

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• “I have the loose-ended feeling of looking, looking. What am I looking for? Looking for substance, looking for a moment I do not understand. Is that just how this part of life is? Do we ever have the sensation of finding, of arriving? I worry that life is always in the future and I am always here, in the preamble, straightening up the cushions so that life will go smoothly once it does begin.”

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• “He was happy. All his life. ALL his life. There is an all now: beginning and end. But then I suppose no one gets out alive.
  Lately, in the last years especially, he has been so happy. Surely that is a good life? That is enough? Dear God, I hope so.”

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• “But to begin again? No, Virginia. There can be no beginning again. Love and forgiveness are not the same thing.”

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• “It is a terrible thing to grieve for someone who is not dead, not in love with someone else, but just no longer there.”

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• “Sometimes she arches away from me and wears a light halo of genius about her.”

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• “Affection is so much easier to give when it is not owed.”

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• “My rules are simple and clear. We must dispense with insincere politeness- that vapid veneer of untruth that smothers London drawing rooms. Our well-mannered social deceit must not die a private death but a court-ordered hanging in the public square. The archaic animal that is left will be a dangerous and hot-blooded thing. Unruly and impossible to predict. But alive.”

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• “hurled”

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• “I wait for his regret, his guilt, but it does not come. He is a man who always sees the good in things. And in his mind, love is always good.”

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• “Because whiteness is so often treated as invisible, as if only non-Whites are racially and ethnically positioned, White teachers often are particularly afraid to name their own positionality. Identity, including whiteness, is not absolute or fixed; rather, identity is always changing and evolving. Yet we contend that the denial of the existence of the educator’s own positionality creates more barriers and a lack of trust, especially when students are asked so often to name theirs. When an educator’s whiteness is unnamed, it remains in a dominant position, reinforcing that it is the noncolor color by which all other colors are measured.”

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• “Roger was not flattered, because he did not recognize what was happening. Things that do not matter to him are invisible.”

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• “She could not beat to be irrelevant. Virginia lives to be essential.”

  Priya Parmar

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