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1 " Once again she had the disorientating feeling that her past was still happening, unfolding in a parallel stream right alongside her present. "
― Nell Freudenberger , The Newlyweds
2 " It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. 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. "
3 " Men she thought, could make a clean break with a woman, could leave in the way Parveen's husband had. Or could even be left, like George and determine to make a life another way. It was women who longed to retain ties and connections, to mix things up in complicated ways. "
4 " Years had passed, but we were still arguing about the same stuff. These patterns repeat themselves, with parents and children—that’s another reason I went to India. If I was going to have a family, I wanted it to be totally different from the one I’d had. "
5 " Fariq took the phone without asking and redialed the number, as if her difficulty might be the result of general female incompetence "
6 " But Amina couldn’t stand to look. It wasn’t that George was old but that he felt sorry for himself that drove her crazy. If her father was Thunder, then George was Smoke—and how could you argue with someone who began to disappear as soon as you opened your mouth? "
7 " She nodded, concealing her emotion because she thought Kim might try to hug her again, and she was never going to get used to the "
8 " She nodded, concealing her emotion because she thought Kim might try to hug her again, and she was never going to get used to the casual frequency of American hugging. "
9 " American English was different from the language she’d learned at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, but she was lucky because George corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes. "
10 " Why would some people attracted to what is unfamiliar and others tat what they knew. She thought It may to do how comfortable you are in your own life, how well you though you belong "
11 " 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. "
12 " Was there a person who existed beneath languages? "
13 " 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. "
14 " 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. "
15 " 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. "
16 " 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. "
17 " 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. "
18 " 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. "
19 " 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. "
20 " 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. "