“For where shall a man turn who has no money? Where can he go? Wide, wide world, but as narrow as the coins in your hand. Like a tethered goat, so far and no farther. Only money can make the rope stretch, only money.”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“To those who live by the land there must always come times of hardship, of fear and of hunger, even as there are years of plenty. This is one of the truths of our existence as those who live by the land know: that sometimes we eat and sometimes we starve. We live by our labours fromone harvest to the next, there is no certain telling whether we shall be able to feed ourselves and our children, and if bad times are prolonged we know we must see the weak surrender their lives and this fact, too, is within our experience. In our lives there is no margin for misfortune.”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“Well, and what if we give in to our troubles at every step! We would be pitiable creatures indeed to be so weak, for is not a man's spirit given to him to rise above his misfortunes? As for our wants, they are many and unfilled, for who is so rich or compassionate as to supply them? Want is our companion from birth to death, familiar as the seasons or the earth, varying only in degree. What profit to bewail that which has always been and cannot change?”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“Sometimes at night I think that my husband is with me again, coming gently through the mists, and we are tranquil together. Then the morning comes, the wavering grey turns to gold, there is stirring within me as the sleepers awake, and he softly departs.”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“We live by our labors from one harvest to the next, there is no certain telling whether we shall be able to feed ourselves and our children, and if bad times are prolonged we know we must see the weak surrender their lives and this fact, too, is within our experience. In our lives there is no margin for misfortune.”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“You must cry out if you want help. It is no use whatsoever to suffer in silence. Who will succour the drowning man if he does not clamour for his life?”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“That is all you can think of: what people will say! One goes from one end of the world to the other to hear the same story. Does it matter what people say?”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“He sighed impatently. 'You simplify everything, being without understanding. Your views are so limited it is impossible to explain to you.' 'Limited, yes,' I agreed. Yet not wholly without understanding. Our ways are not your ways.”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“There is a rare gentleness in you, the sweeter for its brief appearances.”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“Troubles,' he said. 'We all have them.”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“She was no longer a child, to be cowed or forced into submission, but a grown woman with a definite purpose and an invincible determination.”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“We had for so long accepted her obedience to our will that when it ceased to be given naturally, it came as a considerable chock; yet there was no option but to accept the change, strange and bewildering as it was, for obedience cannot be extorted.”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
Kamala Markandaya
Born place: in Chimakurti, India
Born date January 1, 1924
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“Why, what’s the matter?” asked the teacher again. This time Elizabeth Ann didn’t answer, because she herself didn’t know what the matter was. But I do, and I’ll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up.”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“I’m not the most precious, adorable, little thing you’ve ever seen in your life.”
― Olivia Cunning, quote from Wicked Beat
“There's no such thing as im-POSSIBLE, Hiccup, only im-PROBABLE. The only thing that limits us are the limits to our imagination”
― Cressida Cowell, quote from How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse
“you make me want to know what goes on in that head of yours. I'll be honest: I'm not usually interested in the contents of others people's heads. My own is work enough.”
― Julie Buxbaum, quote from Tell Me Three Things
“Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them is what it means to be convicted of rape--I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightening that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance--which was not chance--had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this:
She was Cunt.
She had "lost" something.
Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick--but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had "gotten away with" something (possibly what she had "lost").
And there I was at eleven years of age:
She was out late at night.
She was in the wrong part of town.
Her skirt was too short and that provoked him.
She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk.
I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a grey, geometric plane--or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies.
I was dirty.
I was crying.
I demanded comfort.
I was being inconvenient.
I did not disappear into thin air.”
― Joanna Russ, quote from The Female Man
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