Nidhie Sharma QUOTES

1 " Force is often used to enforce peace and an A bomb did bring world war 2 to a shuddering halt. The funniest people sometimes commit suicide and good souls often break a zillion hearts. That’s just who were are…sinners and saints in equal measure, our contradictions continually shaping our humanity and if we deny these paradoxes, we deny the existence of the very evolution that got us here. "

― Nidhie Sharma

2 " Have you every clawed at the gates of your memory, desperately trying to grab a piece that’s slowly disappearing? Have you ever run into the fog chasing someone who is becoming one with it? Have you revisited your most difficult hour only ‘cause you need your heart to ache, your body convulse? If you have then you know that pain makes us powerfully alive even if it breaks our hearts over and over again. The compulsion to chase a painful fading memory is all but human. It cannot be fought. It shouldn’t. "

― Nidhie Sharma

3 " Memories, they make us who were are, slowly etching themselves into our faces, one wrinkle at a time. Every wrinkle…a memory of someone we loved, of someone we lost, of the lives we wished we’d lived, of the things we did..both right and wrong "

― Nidhie Sharma

4 " Stories choose us, not the other way around. "

― Nidhie Sharma

5 " The stories we are destined to tell find us. "

― Nidhie Sharma

6 " When a story gets wedged in your head and refuses to go away, when it keeps coming back, again and again, despite your seeming inability to tell it, know this..the story has chosen you and You are ready, so tell it or it’ll haunt you to the end of your days. Characters too! They will find you, drop anchor and before you know, they will speak through you, shaping their own narrative, their own unique destiny. Let go and allow them. You have no option but to be a channel for them. This joy of surrender can only be felt… never truly explained. "

― Nidhie Sharma

7 " Are infinite possibilities a storyteller's worst enemy or best friend? I'd say a bit of both really and one must be grateful for this paradox. "

― Nidhie Sharma

8 " A deep level of personal engagement is key to good writing and complete immersion by the writer will translate into a richer and more engaging experience for the reader. "

― Nidhie Sharma

9 " Sometimes the universe gives signs, it foreshadows.
It warns. Sometimes coming events cast their shadows before.Momentously happy ones too. But sometimes those signs are just our hearts wanting something so desperately that we project them. All things said, this whole reading-the-signs business can be tricky as hell. "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

10 " The Jungle was alive. A throbbing entity with its own rules of engagement. And the rules were fairly simple. That you did not try to engage with it. That you had to let it own you. The Jungle had ears and eyes. It found your fears faster than you found your strength. And word travelled fast, really fast. Especially if raging waters criss-crossed through its hear. If you did not square off with your fears, the Jungle would square off with you. "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

11 " Army Brat: an acronym for Born, raised and transferred. Brats, irreverent, sometimes more reckless than courageous and unabashedly basking in the reflected glory and adoration our fathers deservedly received. But mostly we were gypsies--agile quick-witted and tough bunch of youngsters growing up in a world that barricaded the rest of the universe out and kept us cocooned within ours.
The brats moved every two years across the country, from one cantonment to another, inadvertently learning to adapt and engage faster than their 'civilian' counterparts changed their iphones.
Resilience was a byproduct of this lifestyle.
Our wings were our roots. And those wings had brought my father to Tawang, a sensitive military base near out border with China. "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

12 " The journey back to civilisation was often a whole lot faster and just as dramatic. On an MI-17 helicopter no less! Sitting atop and around military cargo. The best way to describe the Tawang sojourn was to compare it to a VR game, where one went from 'Jack and the Beanstalk' to the land of Black Hawk Down, all within nine weeks "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

13 " For five long minutes, the skies rumbled and poured,
carpet-bombing the Jungle with spear-like drops. Puncturing the surface of the water with ferocity and purpose, those dark clouds were unrelenting. Unleashing their little warrior drops with the express purpose of drowning us. Cooking up a storm, relishing the deluge. Or perhaps the clouds were not at fault; maybe their delicate frame could no longer
hold the water. Maybe the Jungle had conspired with Zeus and Indra. "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

14 " I’ve often wondered that if I could go back in time, would I make the same decisions? I think I would. After all, we all make bad decisions and some of them snowball into cataclysms far bigger than we could have imagined and beyond our control.
We still make them because they are meant to be made; they are meant to reveal who we are, to aid us in our journeys … "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

15 " Growing up, I had three amazing dogs with distinct
personalities. One of them was a randy mid-sized German spitz called Snoopy, father to countless puppies within a one- mile radius of our home in the cantonment. No lock could keep
Snoopy in, no wall was too high. In the summer months, he slept besides his knell in the garden. His nocturnal rendezvous became the talk of town when he snuck into a fellow officer’s garden to sow his wild oats with Debbie the Doberman, who was twice his size. Snoopy was as unapologetic as my mother
was embarrassed when the offi cer’s wife came home. She feared for Snoopy’s life, she told my mother diplomatically. "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

16 " In love with Tawang. I still am.
I’ve clung on to every bit of its wonder within the snow globe of my memory, whilst an instrumental piece of music plays in the background. It was a CD that my father played often in his room at the barracks. I had read somewhere that every memory has a soundtrack of its own. ’Tis true! Th at
piece of instrumental music and Tawang are inextricably entwined in my head. "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

17 " Trees talk if you care to listen. I know that now but back then, I had only heard the old oak tree outside my window back home. I’d heard it breathe. Yes, breathe. On the cold nights when I sat up prepping for my exams, when the rest of the world fell into a deep slumber, I heard the Old Oak: a bit eerie, like an old man, its breathing, laboured and arrhythmic.
I wasn’t hallucinating; Picking up my stopwatch, I checked if there was a pattern and there was one. A clear and loud inhalation and exhalation, almost human-like. I wondered if the Old Oak was trying to communicate with me. Tell me its story? "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

18 " I suppose the precise moment when death swoops in to snatch your soul isn't actually terrifying. The nanoseconds preceding it are like Final Destination 6 playing out at 120 frames per second. The Jeep hurtling down, me inside it, being tossed around violently, screaming, watching the freefall knowing that the gas tank has 60 gallons of petrol in it and seeing a protruding rock fifty metres ahead. Now that is cruel! "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

19 " I had always hoped to die in my sleep with a peaceful look and a rose-tinted lip balm on, so the idea of having my mangled charred parts picked from a hundred mile radius was mortifying. That was no way to go if the Gods loved you, I reasoned. At thirteen, most of us beleived that we were loved. I did go home and write up that will, just in case they didn't "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

20 " So Tawang it was for three summers. Three spectacular summers, new friendships and an accidental adventure that is still fresh in my mind.
Tawang was and is special in so many ways. Ten thousand feet above sea level, home to the oldest monastery in Asia, with clouds that floated right into the military barracks. "

― Nidhie Sharma , INVICTUS

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