Home > Author > Nell Freudenberger
21 " Amina knew she was a different person in Bangla than she was English; she noticed the change every time she switched languages on the phone. She was older in English, and also less fastidious; she was the parent to her parents. "
― Nell Freudenberger , The Newlyweds
22 " Was there a person who existed beneath languages? "
23 " Amina couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to remember your own mother; there had been no one to tell him, through looks and touch and angry scoldings, that he was the most precious person in the world to her. "
24 " She had believed that she’d been born with a soul whose thoughts were in no particular dialect, and she’d imagined that, when she married, her husband would be able to recognize this deep part of herself. "
25 " I think that with most of our friends we choose how much of ourselves to reveal, and with a very select few it feels as if there is no choice. "
― Nell Freudenberger , Lost and Wanted
26 " Her whole body was tired, but her mind had the jangly, wakeful feeling that sometimes came over her when she was lying in bed at night in Rochester. "
27 " Cheating means something though,” she said. “Americans are obsessed with it.” “Americans in particular?” “I think they worry about it more—so it happens more. "
28 " You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did. "
29 " One clue is that in pseudoscience, every piece fits neatly inside a theory and the scientist is never wrong. "
30 " I think we believed that what we'd achieved acamically was akin to growing up, rather than something we might have done in place of it. "
31 " Her mother had always seen things that other people couldn’t; she was especially susceptible to ghosts and jinnis, who had appeared to her ever since she was a child. "
32 " Relationships were never equivalent: that was why it was so hard to find permanent ones. When two people depended on each other, they each had their own reasons. Sometimes the reasons balanced each other out temporarily, and the two of you were suspended gently in air. Then inevitably, one side came crashing down. "
― Nell Freudenberger , The Dissident
33 " They forget how much they used to love their own parents,” she said, “when they were kids. "
34 " But it wasn’t the intermittent reception or even the whispering that exasperated Amina so much as a familiar trick of her mother’s: to bring up a subject in such a roundabout way that Amina had to pry it out of her, as if she were the one who’d wanted to discuss it in the first place. "
35 " A novel is a letter you write to someone you don't know. "
― Nell Freudenberger , Lucky Girls
36 " They know you and George are coming to get us,” her mother said. George doesn’t want you to come and live with us. “They think we’re rich.” I can’t get pregnant. "
37 " She turned off the water, and for a moment she was a newcomer again, alone in the house after George had gone to work. "
38 " Mrs. Rahman. It was impossible to know whether Mokta "
39 " In Desh, you can make your plans, but they usually do not succeed. But in America you make your plans and then they happen. "
40 " Who knows? Why do women do anything they do? Except for you,” George amended, as he always did. “You’re logical. "