Home > Author > Sunjeev Sahota
1 " Nothing can come of nothingness, the granthi had said. So to know joy, compassion, sympathy - to feel love - means also to have in the world their opposites. "
― Sunjeev Sahota , The Year of the Runaways
2 " It’s different for women, isn’t it? They have no choice where they go. They grow up in a prison and then get married into one. "
― Sunjeev Sahota , China Room
3 " Happiness is a pretty precarious state, Randeep. I'm content. That's more than enough. That's more than most. "
4 " I don't see what's so good about helping others, though. If they only become reliant on you. Then you're just part of the problem. "
5 " It really is a pathetic thing. To mourn a past you never had. Don't you think? "
6 " What decadence this belonging rubbish was, what time the rich must have if they could sit around and weave great worries out of such threadbare things. "
7 " Funny how God offers you everything you've asked for, only to force you to turn it away. "
8 " Nothing in their lives was working and the city lay there roaring its indifference. What a world. "
9 " You know what the best thing is about falling out of love? It sets you free. Because when you’re in love it is everything, it is imprisoning, it is all there is, and you’d do anything, anything to keep that love. But when it withers you can suddenly see the rest of the world again, everything else floods back into the places that love had monopolised. "
10 " ...and beside that longing, faith that life need not remain a wall of anger, that it can also be full of beautiful moments that just seem to arrive with the birds. "
11 " You're always welcome, but maybe it would be better if you were with people in the same difficulties as you. "
12 " He couldn't work it out. He felt too young to be married, though. He felt too young to be anything. "
13 " I think you have to be fair, Mr Greatrix. To treat people as kindly as you'd want those closest to you to be treated. I might be your tenant but I'm also your friend and neighbour.'Someone once said to her that when she spoke she made people feel naked against the world. "
14 " But I thought I’d always be your little boy?” “That’s just something parents say when it suits us. "
15 " The weakest are those who stay put and call it sacrifice, call it not having a choice. Because, really, there was always a choice and she—one of the cowards, she realized—was making hers now. She turned back to the window, to the identical roofs. She closed her hands over the chunni and twisted it tight. “Please. Go away. "
16 " Tell them to stand in the shop for even an hour and you’d think they’d been asked to reverse the cosmos. "
17 " Narinder Kaur had been told the story so often she believed it must be her earliest memory: that she was four years old when she’d sprinted out of their Croydon semi and straight into the road. The car braked just in time. But the funny thing was that the car belonged to a reverend, on his way to open the church, and the reason Narinder had run out of the house in the first place was because her mother had said they needed to hurry, that God was waiting for them. In other words, God, sick of waiting, had come directly to Narinder. "
18 " Narinder squeezed the giant bottle of washing-up liquid until her fingers touched through the plastic. All she got was bubbles and farts. "
19 " Something happened a few years ago that made it clear to me that I'm only ever going to be a guest in this country. That it doesn't matter how many garden parties I threw for my neighbors, this would never be my real home. It's important that a man has a sense of a real home. A sense of his own ending. "
― Sunjeev Sahota
20 " It was amazing to think that she'd always had it wrong, imagining that they were the weak ones, the ones who took their chance. No. The weakest are those who stay put and call it sacrifice, call it not having a choice. "
