Mira Jacob Quotes

There's a particular kind of close you get when you find someone you can trust in a space you don't.

Here is the thing, though, the real, true thing I still have trouble admitting: I can't protect you from everything...I can't protect you from spending a lifetime caught between the beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one. I can't even protect you from the simple fact that sometimes, the people who love us will choose a world that doesn't.

We think our hearts break only from endings - the love gone, the rooms empty, the future unhappening as we stand ready to step into it - but what about how they can shatter in the face of what is possible.

And even if Amina didn't yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.

Sometimes, you go along with it and pretend nothing happened. Sometimes, you hold your breath until the feeling of wanting to be believed passes. Sometimes, you weigh explaining against staying quiet and know they're both just different kinds of heavy.

Why do fathers look ungainly in their daughter's bedrooms? Like mythical beasts wandered in from the forest of another world?

There are small blessings, tiny ones that come unbidden and make the hard day one sigh lighter.

Nobody likes these things life hands us. But part of becoming a man is understanding how to face them head on instead of running all the time. It's time you learned how to do that.

Sometimes, you don't know how confused you are about something important until you try explaining it to someone else.

The commodification of beauty is an economic trap designed to enslave the modern woman.

Weddings are about fantasies—you understand? Your job is to photograph the fantasy, not the reality. Never the reality. If I ever see another picture like that, you’re fired.

Because if you grow up to be the kind of person who asks questions about who you are, why things are the way they are, and what we could do to make them better, then you still have hope for this world, and if you still have hope, my love, then so do I.

We took bets on what would bring him down, which is what you do when you're trying to break your own heart before your country does it for you.

Of course he had a female following. Was there anything college girls found sexier than being told what to think?

What are you girls, if not my very own heart growing up once and for all?

A collection of takeout boxes slumped together like old men in bad weather.

Like many people whose lives had formed around a particularly painful incident, she had grown used to providing ellipses around the event of her brother's death to keep conversations comfortable. At some point the subconscious logic of this had spread to the rest of her life so that she rarely talked about things she had been deeply affected by. It wasn't hard to do.

Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire

Thank God for Saturday mornings. A reprieve from the familiar, a day unworn by routines. Anything was possible.

I was scared to open my mouth. I was scared I would start yelling, and if I started yelling she would be scared of me, and if she was scared of me, she would be right about me.

Because if you grow up to be the kind of person who asks questions about who you are, why things are the way they are, and what we could do to make them better, then you still have hope for the world.

I'm supposed to be thankful for everything. Thank you for publishing me! Thank you for asking me to attend an event! Thank you for thanking me for writing characters you could relate to despite them being Indian! Thank you for saying you almost felt like they were just normal people! [...] Thank you for telling me you wish you had been brave enough to date the Indian girls in high school! Thank you for asking me about whether or not you should take a vacation to India! Thank you for telling me that your Indian neighbor makes your hallway smell like curry! Thank you for apologizing for hating curry, like I am curry's mother!

He’s fine,” Kamala said. “It’s not like that. You’re not listening.” “I am listening! You just told me he’s delusional, and I’m asking—” “I DID NOT SAY HE IS DELUSIONAL. I SAID HE WAS TALKING TO HIS MOTHER.” “Who is dead,” Amina said gently. “Obvious.” “And that’s not delusional?

Why is it that fathers so often ensure the outcome they are trying to avoid? Is their need to dominate so much stronger than their instinct to protect? Did Thomas know, Amina wondered as she watched him, that he had just done the human equivalent of a lion sinking his teeth into his own cub?

Kicked out for what?" Amina asked, and Dimple smiled like she'd won the $25,000 question. "Atheism." A small murmur went up in the room, followed by a few nervous glances. While everyone knew better than to actually believe in God, the outright denial of one seemed dangerous and possibly gauche

Suspiro y me muevo a estudiar los carteles de películas: el Sr. Darcy con su mano en la mejilla de Elizabeth hace nada por mí, más que querer escupir. Puede ser que la ame, pero durante toda su vida, Sr. Darcy quiso ser un desgraciado irritable. Edward Cullen, con sus brazos alrededor de Bella protectoramente mientras Jacob mira hacia ellos, me hace querer vomitar. ¿Y ellos llamaron a su bebe Renesme? POR FAVOR. Jack y Rose del Titanic me tienen apretando los puños. Rose debió abandonarlo ese día. Si lo hubiera hecho, podrían haber llegado a la balsa salvavidas. Romeo y Julieta se ven como idiotas para mí ahora. Ellos sabían que no funcionaria. Romeo nunca debería haber vuelto a su balcón. Fue su estúpida culpa. Él lo sabía. Si él simplemente no hubiera intentado, ambos habrían vivido. ¿Y quién bebe estúpido veneno para resolver sus problemas? Lamentable. Patético. Todos ellos.

Rob Halford?” Chacko asked. “He’s a singing priest,” Kamala said, and the others nodded quickly. “Akhil admired him very much.

The trouble began when my 6-year-old son, Z, became obsessed with Michael Jackson.

Was it always this way? Did everyone from high school end up looking like weird facsimiles of other people's parents?

She shuddered. Pee talkers baffled her. How could they do that? Give you no opportunity to not listen?

It was a fever, a hot rage of words.

An hour later, Amina stood at a pay phone in a mall hallway, where poop and perfume and the grease from the food court formed the kind of atmosphere you might find in Jupiter's red spot

Thomas sniffed. “Don’t let’s start with all that.” “I am not starting anything! You yourself started this business!” “Enough, Kam. I am warning you.” “You don’t warn me when I’m warning you!

Gina Rodgers raised her hand, triggering a class-wide bristle. Everyone wanted to impress Mr. Tipton, but it was Gina who always raised her hand first, like he was going to fall in love with her for her 4.3 GPA or something.

I mean, if you’re really plunging—you said plunging, right?—into this book, then tethering yourself to every single guidepost along the way isn’t really going to make that happen.” Mr. Tipton’s mirth was palpable. “So you think critical reading is a useless activity? That your classmates are just, what, not experiencing the book?” “I think the best way to experience this book is to let it happen to you and think about what it all means later.” “Later when?” “Later when you’re a high school English teacher.

Mindy Lujan with her feathered hair, bullying blue-lined eyes, and potty mouth that rivaled Akhil's, managing to use fuck as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, often in the same sentence, as in, "Who the fuck does that fucking fuck think she's fucking with?

They were turning now, panning past the Sandias, the black-green crags and rocky faces, the ribbon of road leading to the white crest. Amina looked down on Albuquerque, the light bouncing off the sprawling tile of houses and pools, the cars running along the highways like busy insects. She imagined all of it gone, undone, erased back to 1968, when the city was nothing but eighty miles of hope huddling in a desert storm. She imagined Kamala on the tarmac, walking toward a life in the desert, her body pulled forward by faith and dirty wind.

Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more substantial than a roadside weigh station.

We are all we have here. Do you understand? That is it. And we can all talk about old times and Campa Cola and wouldn’t it be nice if we could go back, but none of us ever want to go back. To what? To who? Our own families can’t even stand us for longer than a few days! No, we are home already, like it or not,

They're sleepwalking... Someone--Kiese Laymon, I think--said most white people are sleepwalking when it comes to racism in America. They don't see it so they think it doesn't exist anymore. Forcing them to see that it is happening here, now, is like waking up a sleepwalker. They get disoriented. Angry at you instead of about the racism itself.

Oh," she said, covering her face with her hand. It was not an oh of disappointment or an oh of surprise but an oh that Amina had never heard before, scraped raw with an emotion Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire. She watched as Paige crossed Akhil's room, undistracted by all the usual things that stopped people- the Greats, his desk, the leather jacket hanging from his chair- and moved straight for his hamper, which she opened up, pulling out a forgotten T-shirt and crushing it into her face. "Oh,", she said again, muffled. Oh. And even if Amina didn't yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.

Cooking was a talent of her mother's that Amina often thought of as an evolutionary way for Kamala to survive herself with friendships intact. Like plumage that expanded to rainbow an otherwise unremarkable bird, Kamala's ability to transform raw ingredients into sumptuous meals brought her the kind of love her personality on its own might have repelled.

The band in the ballroom announced the cover of a special request, and after a pause, the woman's voice sang out the breathy first line of Etta James's "At Last." Chairs barked as guests rose to greet the champion of all wedding songs, the one that always brought indifferent or fighting or estranged couples to the dance floor for momentary reconciliation.

Once, before I had you, I saw you. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. I was pregnant and standing alone outside a party, and when you kicked, I shut my eyes and saw you on a beach we would arrive at almost five years later. You were facing the water and wearing your blue swimsuit and I knew, from the curve in your spine and the nut brown of your skin, that you were mine to protect like nothing else ever will be. So when you first started asking me hard questions, the ones about America and your place here, I wanted to find you the right answers - the kind that would make you feel good, welcome, and loved. I thought if I could just remember the country I'd been raised to believe in, the one I was sure I would eventually get to, I'd be able to get us back there. Here is the thing, though, the real, true thing I still have trouble admitting: I can't protect you from everything. I can't protect you from becoming a brown man in America. I can't protect you from spending a lifetime caught between the beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one. I can't even protect you from the simple fact that sometimes, the people who love us will choose a world that doesn't. Even now, just writing that down, I want to say something that will make it okay, or even make it make sense, but I can't. Will they ever really understand it themselves? Will they ever change? I have no idea. Our burden is how much we might love them anyway. And this is maybe the part I worry about the most, how the weight of that will twist you into someone you don't want to be, or worse, make you ashamed of your own heart. I hope you will remember that you have nothing to be ashamed of. I hope you will remember that your heart is a good one, and that your capacity to feel love, in all its complexity, is a gift.

-¿No tenéis acaso otra hija? -No-dijo el hombre-, sólo tenemos una Cenicienta, pequeña e ingenua, de mi difunta esposa, pero es imposible que ella sea la novia. El hijo del rey dijo que fueran a buscarla, pero la madre respondió: -Ay, no, está demasiado sucia, no puede dejarse ver. Pero él insistió en verla a toda costa y tuvieron que llamar a Cenicienta. Ella se lavó primero las manos y la cara, fue luego hasta allí y se inclinó ante el hijo del rey, que le tendió el zapato de oro. Después se sentó en un escabel, sacó el pie del pesado zueco de madera y lo metió en la chinela: le quedaba como hecha a medida. Y cuando se enderezó y el rey la miró a la cara, reconoció a la hermosa joven que había bailado con él y dijo: -¡Ésta es la verdadera novia! La madrastra y las dos hermanas se asustaron y empalidecieron de rabia, pero él subió a Cenicienta al caballo y se marchó de allí. Al pasar por el pequeño avellano, las dos palomitas blancas dijeron: -Vuélvete y mira, vuélvete y mira, ya no hay sangre en la zapatilla: la zapatilla bien ya le encaja, a la novia de verdad llevas a casa.

-¿No tenéis acaso otra hija? -No-dijo el hombre-, sólo tenemos una Cenicienta, pequeña e ingenua, de mi difunta esposa, pero es imposible que ella sea la novia. El hijo del rey dijo que fueran a buscarla, pero la madre respondió: -Ay, no, está demasiado sucia, no puede dejarse ver. Pero él insistió en verla a toda costa y tuvieron que llamar a Cenicienta. Ella se lavó primero las manos y la cara, fue luego hasta allí y se inclinó ante el hijo del rey, que le tendió el zapato de oro. Después se sentó en un escabel, sacó el pie del pesado zueco de madera y lo metió en la chinela: le quedaba como hecha a medida. Y cuando se enderezó y el rey la miró a la cara, reconoció a la hermosa joven que había bailado con él y dijo: -¡Ésta es la verdadera novia! La madrastra y las dos hermanas se asustaron y empalidecieron de rabia, pero él subió a Cenicienta al caballo y se marchó de allí. Al pasar por el pequeño avellano, las dos palomitas blancas dijeron: -Vuélvete y mira, vuélvete y mira, ya no hay sangre en la zapatilla: la zapatilla bien ya le encaja, a la novia de verdad llevas a casa. (Fragmento perteneciente al cuento de Cenicienta)

Lately, with Thomas not working and Kamala trying her hand at puff pastry, there was almost always someone around, someone shuffling below and making it feel like even if they weren’t quite in sync, they were a team of sorts, a little tight unit. Now, with Sanji on her way to the hospital, Amina was alone with the unease of having brought the others into the mix. It wasn’t that she doubted their love or intentions, but the weight of that love would be no small thing. What would they do with everyone else’s worry on top of their own? Thomas did not weather other people’s concern well. He was not going to be happy with her.

Because all of us are so ready to talk about the world we live in. We are ready to have a publishing industry that is of that world.

We think our hearts break only from endings - the love gone, the rooms empty, the future unhappening as we stand ready to step into it - but what about how they can shatter in the face of what is possible?

And this is maybe the part I worry about the most, how the weight of that will twist you into someone you don't want to be, or worse, make you ashamed of your own heart. I hope you will remember that you have nothing to be ashamed of. I hope you will remember that your heart is a good one, and that your capacity to feel love, in all its complexity, is a gift.

Hey, dickheads!” I hollered out over the raging storm, just as one beast swooped down to grab another tree. They must have had super hearing, too, because the moment the words were out of my mouth, their massive, ugly faces turned toward Mira and me. “Smart thinking,” the warrior hissed next to me before she joined in. “You ugly fucker of mothers! Look over here!” One day, I’d have to sit down and give Mira the rundown on slang. Although, I did kind of like “fucker of mothers.

Their eyes were all wide, some with disgust, but most of them just looked deeply intrigued. “I will try it.” Ainsley nodded. I handed her a plate with a tiny piece of meat on it, just enough for one bite. The blonde slowly lifted it to her nose and sniffed. She paused, deliberated, and then took another long whiff. “It does smell good,” she informed me. Ainsley pinched the tiny piece of food between one slender thumb and forefinger and then slowly lifted it up to her perfect mouth. I watched, thrilled, as her pink lips closed around the dark brown chunk. Then she chewed twice before her brilliant eyes went wide, and a smile spread across her face. “It is tasty!” she informed me, before she turned to the rest of the village. “Meat is good!” There was a wave of extremely distrusting mumbling that rippled through them, and Theora’s eyes narrowed as she watched Ainsley. “I will have a piece, then,” the brunette announced. “To the dark side come over,” Mira chuckled in her best attempt at a Yoda voice, and she completely butchered one of my favorite sayings.

I like throwing parties, too...I like making lists and buying ingredients and demanding things of my loved ones.

Sometimes, you don’t know how confused you are about something important until you try explaining it to someone else.

We think our hearts break only from endings—the love gone, the rooms empty, the future unhappening as we stand ready to step into it—but what about how they can shatter in the face of what is possible?

Paula told me that you thought that maybe some of my friends thought you were the help at the party." "Some of your friends thought I was the help at the party." "Are you sure? I just can't imagine anyone actually doing that." Sometimes, you go along with it and pretend nothing happened. Sometimes, you hold your breath until the feeling of wanting to be believed passes. Sometimes, you weigh explaining against staying quiet and know they're both just different kinds of heavy. Sometimes, when it's your mother-in-law - a woman you started calling mom the day you got engaged because you admired the ferocity with which she loved her children, and maybe even wanted some of it for yourself - you look ahead and see all the years of birthdays and graduations and weddings that will be shadowed by things she can't imagine about your life. Sometimes, you can't hold your breath long enough.

Wait!” I called out and stopped in my tracks. “Hali wants more of those fruits.” The ones the gryphons gifted us with? Nixie asked. “Yeah, but we don’t know where they got them,” Mira pointed out. As if on cue, the squawk of a gryphon came down through the trees, and one of the winged beasts landed right in front of us, with two of the fruits clutched in his beak. Boy, sometimes, weird shit went down on this island,