Durga Chew Bose Quotes

Nook people are those of us who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room.

Change, I've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable.

Even when I was nothing, I was arriving.

Even when I’m caught off guard by a lathery shade of peach on the bottom corner of a painting at the Met, as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors, and how there’s more to see, and how one color’s newness can invalidate all of my sureness.

Memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. Memory isn’t a well but an offshoot. It goes secretly. Comes apart. Deceives. It’s guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you’ve emotionalized.

Writing is losing focus and winning it back, only to lose it once more.

Then again, maybe that’s why I’m drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities.

There’s strength in observing one’s miniaturization. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn’t smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance, the momentum gained from reading a great book. After after, sitting, sleeping, living in its consequence. A book that makes you feel, finally, latched on.

Women who are in no rush to respond to a world that’s only conceived them as its consequence.

Because there is trust too, in feeling small.

A nook person finds the dog at the party; drinks wine from a mug; sits on the floor and braids carpet tassels only to become self-conscious and unbraid them.

To this day, watching a woman mindlessly tend to one thing while doing something else absorbs me. Like securing the backs of her earrings while wiggling her feet into her shoes. Like staring into some middle distance, where lines soften, and where she separates the relevant from the immaterial.

What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I've only experienced through photos, visits, food. It's not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.

The best ideas outrun me. That’s why I write.

If you share too much of yourself, you risk growing into someone who has nothing unacknowledged.

At any rate, isn’t it lovely to, once in a while, feel small in the presence of your friend? Awed. Fortunate to experience nearness that calls upon space.

A woman carries her inner life - lugs it around or holds it in fumes that both poison and bless her - while nourishing another's inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind.

Writing is a closed pistachio shell.

It’s an elbow propped on the edge of a table when you’re wrapping up an argument, or to signify you’re just getting started. An elbow propped on the edge of a table is an adverb.

Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment. Letting form pass through you.

Isn’t it fun to read a sentence that races ahead of itself?

Until you write what is detectable but dislodges you. Like the smell of cinnamon.

Resurfacing is nonpareil. And splitting a sandwich with someone you’ve said maybe two words to all morning is idyllic.

Nook people express appreciation in the moment by maintaining how much we will miss what is presently happening. Our priorities are spectacularly disordered. A nook person might spend the last few years of her twenties thinking she is dying. Convinced of it. Nook

I don’t require much to feel far-removed; to impose my wanderings on what’s close. Because of this, my friend and I have started calling ourselves nook people. Those of us who seek corners and bays in order to redeploy our hearts and not break the mood. Those of us who retreat in order to cubicle our flame. Who collect sea glass. Who value a deep pants pocket. Who are our own understudies and may as well have shadowboxes for brains.

She is all at once unused but oh, so used up. Or very used to. Why is it that when a woman is occupied by the voice in her head, or the wear of her day, or the landscape that passes through her eyes like windows on a train, the world assumes she is up for grabs? A vacant stare does not mean vacancy.

maybe that’s why I’m drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities.

I counted them and double-checked because extra-small things bring out the extra-small person in me who sometimes even triple-checks things; who still chances certainty might exist in asking, “Promise me?

A distinguishing quality of the women I love, meaning, none of us are bothered by how infrequently we see one another. We have an arrangement that was never formally arranged. A consideration for turning down invitations. We are happy for the person who is indulging in her space, and how she might merely be spending the weekend unescorted by anything except her work, which could also mean: she is in no rush to complete much. She is tinkering. She is gathering all the materials necessary for repotting a plant but not doing it. She is turning off the lights and climbing into her head because that’s usually the move.

Those yet-to-access riches that I’d suspect are what tingle when a song’s lyrics eject me into outer space; assure me I can love; can go about and be loved; can retreat and still get, as in both catch and understand, love.

A woman carries her inner life—lugs it around or holds it in like fumes that both poison and bless her—while nourishing another’s inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind.

Is there something to be learned from fast tenderness that wanes just as fast as it forms?

Or how staring at ocean water so blue, it leaves me bereft. In postcards, I’ll scribble “So blue!” because, what else?

First love is all sensation and ambient zooms, and letting the world ebb. Like writing, occasionally, it feels combustive. Greedy. It’s unsophisticated and coaxes you into making promises about the far future and imbibing the moment. Into growing gullible fast, frantically so, and forgetting about yourself—about your exception. Writing does the same. It lays siege.

There's a type of inborn initiative that comes from having never been obligated to answer questions about one's name, or one's country of so-called origin, or to explain the way you look is generationally and geographically worlds apart from where you were born. Since childhood, there's been this assumption that I owe strangers an answer when they inquire about matters I myself struggle to have words for, let alone understand.

I’ve felt infinity too, late in my twenties, when I discovered a word in English I’d only ever known in Bengali. Or when I spot, with hours still left in the day, the moon’s hazy thumbprint. How the moon enjoys debunking the day.

I tend to forget or rather, rarely cash in on — like coupons piling up — the proximity of people. If I wanted, I could walk a few blocks and find a friend, a friend who is likely experiencing coincidental gloom, blahs, and Sunday doom, because if there’s one thing I know to be true about New York friendships: they are intervened time and again by emotional kismet. Stupid, unprecedented quantities of it. We’re all just here, bungling this imitation of life, finding new ways of becoming old friends.

Even then, when I felt tremendously sad in my lovely dress, my heart did not stop.

The sheer, ensorcelled panic of feeling moved.

That spiked measure of awe—of oof—feels like a general slowing, even though what’s really taking place is nothing short of a general quickening.

Memory is trust open to doubt.

watching fireworks backward: tinsel swallowed into the night sky instead of spitting out from it.

The genius of the word is that it’s more of an expression than a word.

Nook people can overstate their love for a movie, having only watched it once. They are alert to how some spectacles become basically unbearable the second time. And, well, there are benefits to claiming something you’ve only experienced once as your favorite. It’s useful to have many favorites.

It’s imperative that writing consists of not living up to your own taste. Of leaving the world behind so you can hold fast to what’s strange inside; what’s unlit. A soreness. A neglected joy. The way forward is perhaps not maintaining a standard for accuracy but appraising what naturally heaps. Writing

Tell a woman she is beautiful, and she might—it’s very possible—feel like a fool. Roses die quick. They will do. The girl you want does not exist. The girl you want does exist. But not like that. And not like that. Or like that. Or like that. She is sitting across from you, looking just beyond you—at herself.

Nook people confuse emotional truth with other varieties of truth. They are a composite of the last person who complimented them and the next person who might ignore them, and also whomever or whatever they consider themselves a child of.

Or when I meet someone new who loves a movie just as I’ve loved that movie; who speaks at such a clip about it—tenderly, contagiously—that I forget to speak at all and smile like a fool because, now and then, meeting new people isn’t so terrible. Even

And in those moments when the two of them are playing dead, I quietly climb back upstairs because, as time passes and as I spot my parents doing young, lighthearted things, I'm overrun by some cruel and preoccupying sense that I'm watching the memory of them.

And besides, it feels more covert to have no evidence. To believe that something you’ve experienced will build on your extent—your extent as a person who sees things, and is moved by things—without ever having to prove those things happened exactly as they happened.

It still comes as a shock to me how irreversible life is. How there's no going back to whatever version of me existed before I saw that movie – the kind that switches me on to new streaks of consciousness by showing me a woman I feel strangely, formerly, acquainted with.

Why is it that when a woman is occupied by the voice in her head, or the wear of her day, or the landscape that passes through her eyes like windows on a train, the world assumes she is up for grabs? A vacant stare does not mean vacancy. It's the inverse of invitation, and yet.

Even when a thought springs fresh in my mind on the subway and solves an essay I’d just about abandoned. On the rare occasion my subconscious welds, language has a gift, I’ve learned, for humiliating those luminous random acts of creative flash into impossible-to-secure hobbling duds. The best ideas outrun me. That’s why I write.

No matter how lackluster its surroundings, within seconds, all was new again for a goldfish because it had figured out how to repair its sense of spectacle.

Watching her means paying attention.

Ray once said in an interview that he directs his films “in harmony with the rhythm of human breathing.

Even then, when time decelerates and the relative importance of our lives, of our hurry, undergoes a sudden, essential audit; even then, our heart never stops.

Smallness can make you feel extra porous. Extra ambitious. Like a small dog carrying an enormous branch clenched in its teeth, as if intimating to the world: Okay. Where to?

I’ve tried writing with that belief in mind, discovering instead how deep inhales and the release of a strong exhale are furthest from writing’s doubled-up glove.

that makes me want to make stuff instead of make sense,

These women who perhaps even balk at the word survival and favor instead a far more fluctuant current: continuance.

Because nook people are turned on by and twig how terribly normal it is to drop out of life occasionally.

When those fault lines inside of us quake on account of all that is built up and unkempt between two people in love—on account of perceptiveness and wariness resembling in tone.

They experienced the world, I supposed, as I experienced going to the movies: that flash of amazement petitioned, in part, from feeling small in the presence of bigness.

The whole Esther Williams of it all. The ostrich ballet. Like pirouetting feather dusters; their paddle feet in fourth position.

Watching movies was, and still is, an opportunity for my heart to rush irregularly while the cost, for me, remains low.

The spiteful blink of my cursor: how it mocks. The rude temperature of a crisp day: how it bullies.

There are so many photos I’ve never seen and questions I do not ask, because seeing them and asking them, I worry, precipitates an end.

How many versions of happiness involve a smile? Are determined by feeling fulfilled?

It’s as though I miscarried all that glee we are entitled to in childhood.

I’ll believe anything because I want to understand, yet understanding can sometimes organize itself like a series of false starts.

How it’s frantic enough to summon past jealousies, no matter how beyond them you think you are.

nakedness can’t undo the day,

despite the wrench of good instinct—that queasy wave of it—of learning young that having a hunch is, like so many female facets, both misery and boon.

as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors,

Sick for my body before. Before I’d ever noticed I was in possession of one. Before fulllengths. Before I knew anything about valleyed collarbones, a stomach’s folds, smooth legs, small wrists.

What I enjoy is this. Responding to an artist’s work as if it were a missive. A film can be a fling I’ll cool with sentences I address to the director but that I’ll tuck into this essay instead.

There’s might too in the incomplete. In feeling fractional. A failure to carry out is perhaps no failure at all, but rather a minced metric of splendor. The ongoing. The outlawed. The no-patrol. The act of making loose. Of not doing as you’ve been told. Of betting on miscalculations and cul-de-sacs. Why force conciliation when, from time to time, long-held deep breaths follow what we consider defeat? Why not want a little mania? The shrill of chance, of what’s weird. Of purple hats and hiccups. Endurance is a talent that seldom worries about looking good, and abiding has its virtues even when the tongue dries. The intention shouldn’t only be to polish what we start but to acknowledge that beginning again and again can possess the acquisitive thrill of a countdown that never reaches zero. Groping

Even when I’m caught off guard by a lathery shade of peach on the bottom corner of a painting at the Met, as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors, and how there’s more to see, and how one color’s newness can invalidate all of my sureness. To experience infinity and sometimes too the teasing melancholy born from the smallest breakthroughs, like an unanticipated shade of peach, like Buster Keaton smiling, or my friend Doreen’s laugh—how living and opposite of halfhearted it is. Or my beautiful mother growing out her gray, or a lightning bolt’s fractal scarring on a human body, or Fantin-Latour’s hollyhocks, or the sound of someone practicing an instrument—the most sonically earnest sound. Or how staring at ocean water so blue, it leaves me bereft. In postcards, I’ll scribble “So blue!” because, what else?

I find the plainness and economizing record of materials handled calming. Realistic yet not austere, because what corresponds—the words oil on canvas—has everything and nothing to do with what I’m looking at.

Nook people know the words to a movie by heart but never say them out loud because anticipation is an asset. Because there’s no interrupting Katharine Hepburn when she’s interrupting herself: “Aren’t the geraniums pretty, Professor?

In childhood, having a sister, especially if she was older, meant sharing a wall with—it’s possible—some likeness of your near-future self. Movies, books, the March sisters, all of it, devised a rubric that engrossed me because sisterhood amounted to what I envied: not having to learn how to join.

That spiked measure of awe—of oof—feels like a general slowing, even though what’s really taking place is nothing short of a general quickening. The sheer, ensorcelled panic of feeling moved. Infirmed by what switches me on but also awake and unexpectedly cured. Similar to how sniffing a lemon when I’m carsick heals.

My quick-summoned first love—how everything was enough because I knew so little but felt cramped with certainty—is, I’m afraid, just like writing. That is to say, what can transpire if writing becomes a reason for living outside the real without prying it open. How, like first love, writing can be foiling, agitated, totally addictive. Sweet, insistent, jeweled. Consuming though rarely nourishing. A new tactility.

Is my function to reach zero and leave nothing in the way of obstructing truth? Or to tender what’s still shapeless? The baggy fit of feelings before they’ve found their purpose. How can I present what’s, for now, finished, while also taking comfort in knowing it will evolve? That these words are only materials; provisions for keeping me observant and hopefully light-footed enough to plan my next project. My next many.

A remembrance of what’s impossible to remember. A sixth sense I’ve long guessed is special to those who are born with leftover matter ferrying them rearward. We’re the type who ask too many questions—an irritating amount, really. But who ask without claim or exigency. The want is the want and it goes on like that. My prelude was a waltz Dulcie loved to dance. She and Felix then, are like Etta James in concert: potential energy.

Nook people can overstate their love for a movie, having only watched it once. They are alert to how some spectacles become basically unbearable the second time. And, well, there are benefits to claiming something you’ve only experienced once as your favorite. It’s useful to have many favorites. So many that you've depreciated the use of "favorite." Favorite. Favorite. Favorite. Who cares? At any rate, substantiating favorites is an absurd practice. The genius of the word is that it's more of an expression than a word.

I’ve heard rumors that writing can feel glamorous. But only glamorous, I’d guess, in the way a stretch limo might feel glamorous. No matter the pomp, one still has to crouch inside. Like skulking through a low-lit leather tunnel. An uncooperative space. Writing is awkward work and it’s become clearer to me why friends of mine have relinquished their desks and write instead from the comfort of their beds. Not in bed. From bed. Like sea otters floating on their backs, double-chinned and banging their front paws on a keyboard.

There's a recording of Nina Simone's "Ain't Got No", where Simone, after listing all the things she doesn't have - a home, shoes, money, class, a country, schooling, children, sisters or brothers - she begins, around the two-minute mark, to list all that she's got, that "nobody", she sings, "can take away". Hair on her head, brains, ears, a nose, and her mouth. She has her smile too. Her tongue, her chin, her neck, and, my favourite, her boobies. When Nina Simone shouts "my boobies" in her syrupy, cool-wail of a voice, it's as if she's invented a whole new body part. Boobies. These aren't just breasts, they're boobies; they bob and hang. They're funny and beautiful. They're boobies. And I can never unhear Nina Simone claiming hers.

That the future’s unspecified terms provide a few recognizable basics, and that I might find, somewhere in me, a tension—the good kind—for tapping into what springs me forward, is, I reason, the hope. The discord, the din, what stays the same, what reappears, what’s underneath, the misremembered and all there is to fathom. Growing up, for a long period that’s not worth mentioning here, I thought the expression was “Play it by year.” As in, take your time. A whole year. More. Whatever you need. There’s no rush.” Excerpt From: Durga Chew-Bose. “Too Much and Not the Mood.” Apple Books.

A belief that it’s possible to let one’s guard down and enjoy the emotional knowledge that orbits a home and the memories, while not all good, that confirm her.

How there's no going back to whatever version of me existed before ... I read Marguerite Duras's account of a river and its current, a girl, a lover, a mother, of memory's weakness for women and gold lame heels. Or when I was woken up by the news and this planet's despairing chorus-how it dislocates the heart and coaxes cynics and makes a mass out of individuals. Or whatever version of me existed before I met that boy whom I loved for one winter and well into spring, when the magnolias in early bloom looked not just pink but elaborate, ambient, and grand, like my insides were seeable-flowering so forcefully, like nature cautioning me: Durga, this won't last.

That the future’s unspecified terms provide a few recognizable basics, and that I might find, somewhere in me, a tension—the good kind—for tapping into what springs me forward, is, I reason, the hope. The discord, the din, what stays the same, what reappears, what’s underneath, the misremembered and all there is to fathom. Growing up, for a long period that’s not worth mentioning here, I thought the expression was “Play it by year.” As in, take your time. A whole year. More. Whatever you need. There’s no rush.

Perhaps I’m still unready to conceive of a life entirely my own because I’m preoccupied with the quality of blue in pictures of my parents before I was born.

At least that’s the lie I tell myself, because in my own misshapen idea of it, I have successfully suspended summer’s most common emotion: longing.

Why is it that when a woman is occupied by the voice in her head, or the wear of her day, or the landscape that passes through her eyes like windows on a train, the world assumes she is up for grabs?

First love is all sensation and ambient zooms, and letting the world ebb.

Essays that do not concern these directors’ works but are addressed to them—in spirit, tone, wash—because these directors have, over time, caused me to bend into shape visions that were long hibernating.

The H and its accompanying heart were an expression of, in my mind, heart hospital. Or heart doctor. And not, as I later discovered while scrolling through an emoji glossary online: “Love Hotel.” I was sure the building stood for all matters having to do with that four-chambered, fist-shaped muscle we carry—that carries us—with constancy. That beats—did you know?—more than one hundred thousand times a day.

Who Is It” is a maze. It’s the sound of being stuck in one. It’s the pursuer feeling pursued.