Durga Chew-Bose Quotes & Sayings

There's might too in the incomplete. In feeling fractional. A failure to carry out is perhaps no failure at all, but rather a minced metric of splendor. The ongoing. The outlawed. The no-patrol. The act of making loose. Of not doing as you've been told. Of betting on miscalculations and cul-de-sacs. Why force conciliation when, from time to time, long-held deep breaths follow what we consider defeat? Why not want a little mania? The shrill of chance, of what's weird. Of purple hats and hiccups. Endurance is a talent that seldom worries about looking good, and abiding has its virtues even when the tongue dries. The intention shouldn't only be to polish what we start but to acknowledge that beginning again and again can possess the acquisitive thrill of a countdown that never reaches zero. Groping — Durga Chew-Bose

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

Isn't it fun to read a sentence that races ahead of itself? — Durga Chew-Bose

It's imperative that writing consists of not living up to your own taste. Of leaving the world behind so you can hold fast to what's strange inside; what's unlit. A soreness. A neglected joy. The way forward is perhaps not maintaining a standard for accuracy but appraising what naturally heaps. Writing — Durga Chew-Bose

Is there something to be learned from fast tenderness that wanes just as fast as it forms? — Durga Chew-Bose

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

The sheer, ensorcelled panic of feeling moved. — Durga Chew-Bose

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

Memory is trust open to doubt. Perhaps — Durga Chew-Bose

I don't require much to feel far-removed; to impose my wanderings on what's close. Because of this, my friend and I have started calling ourselves nook people. Those of us who seek corners and bays in order to redeploy our hearts and not break the mood. Those of us who retreat in order to cubicle our flame. Who collect sea glass. Who value a deep pants pocket. Who are our own understudies and may as well have shadowboxes for brains. We — Durga Chew-Bose

Because there is trust too, in feeling small. — Durga Chew-Bose

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

The whole Esther Williams of it all. The ostrich ballet. Like pirouetting feather dusters; their paddle feet in fourth position. — Durga Chew-Bose

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

Even when I was nothing, I was arriving. This — Durga Chew-Bose

Writing is losing focus and winning it back, only to lose it once more. — Durga Chew-Bose

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

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

Change, I've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable. — Durga Chew-Bose

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

Then again, maybe that's why I'm drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities. Before — Durga Chew-Bose

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

There's strength in observing one's miniaturization. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn't smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance, the momentum gained from reading a great book. After after, sitting, sleeping, living in its consequence. A book that makes you feel, finally, latched on. — Durga Chew-Bose

Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment. Letting form pass through you. — Durga Chew-Bose

The genius of the word is that it's more of an expression than a word. Nook — Durga Chew-Bose

Women who are in no rush to respond to a world that's only conceived them as its consequence. — Durga Chew-Bose

Nook people are those of us who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room. — Durga Chew-Bose

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