Nayomi Munaweera Quotes

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.

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.

but I love the long columns of numbers, the need to proceed logically and patiently as the numbers lead you to the final and inevitable answer. It reminds me of dancing. The way my shoulders, the tilt of my arms, and angle of my knees must stay within precise formations, yet also lead where I take them. A sort of freedom that can be attained only within strict rules.

The campus spreads around him like the verdant pleasure garden of an ancient king. He is enraptured by the enormous trees that lift branches like cathedral roofs overhead, shoot roots like polished ballroom floors underfoot. In the hot afternoons he leaves the crowded rooms to study under the protection of these spreading giants.

She's Tamil. That's enough. They take our land, our jobs. If we let them they will take the whole country.

Yet there are moments when I feel a continent apart, when their belonging seems easy and unforced and my own is only pantomime.

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.

We have learned not to care about the state of that other place even as it burns or drowns.

When a bone breaks, it heals stronger in the cracks. I realize this is what is happening to her heart.

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.

This is the beginning of what we will come to call the Upstairs-Downstairs, Linga-Singha wars.

In Sri Lanka, when two strangers meet, they ask a series of questions that reveal family, ancestral village, and blood ties until they arrive at a common friend or relative. Then they say, "Those are our people, so you are our people." It's a small place. Everyone knows everyone.

"But in America, there are no such namings; it is possible to slip and slide here. It is possible to get lost in the nameless multitudes. There are no ropes binding one, holding one to the earth. Unbound by place or name, one is aware that it is possible to drift out into the atmosphere and beyond that, into the solitary darkness where there is no oxygen.

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.

On a fulcrum in my chest, grief and relief are balanced in equal measure.