Quotes from The Buddha of Suburbia

“The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“Please remove your watch,' he said. 'In my domain time isn't a factor.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“And so I sat in the centre of this old city that I loved, which itself sat at the bottom of a tiny island. I was surrounded by people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn't always be this way.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling and screaming in rage like an angry child.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“قد علمتني الحياة أنه حين يراك الآخرون متحمساً، تفتر حماستهم هم، والعكس صحيح . لذا كلما ازدادت رغبتي بأمر ما، تصنّعت بروداً أعظم حياله .”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“Someone to whom jokes are never told soon contracts enthusiasm deficiency.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“Suddenly I shouted into the night air. 'Yes, yes, yes, it is true!"
And now the world had some tension in it; now it twanged and vibrated with meaning and possibility! 'Yes, yes, fucking yes!”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“I began to enjoy my own generosity; I felt the pleasure of pleasing others, especially as this was accompanied by money-power. I was paying for them; they were grateful, they had to be; and they could no longer see me as a failure.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“But you're beautiful, and the beautiful should be given whatever they want."
"Hey, what about the ugly ones?"
"The ugly ones." She poked her tongue out. "It's their fault if their ugly. They're to be blamed, not pitied.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“I admired him more than anyone but I didn't wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I'd throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“The interesting people you wanted to be with - their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“I didn't want to be educated. It wasn't the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn't. The spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn't want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn't want to work in a place where I couldn't wear my fur coat.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“It was clear that Eleanor had been to bed with a large and random collection of people, but when I suggested she go to bed with me, she said, 'I don't think we should, just at the moment, do you?' As a man I found this pretty fucking insulting.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“You see, I have come to believe in self-help, individual initiative, the love of what you do, and the full development of all individuals. I am constantly disappointed by how little we expect of ourselves and of the world.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“صرت مقتنعاً أن الفتنة الشخصية لا الرصانة ولا النزاهة ولا حتى اللياقة هي أولى المواهب الاجتماعية، حتى أنني صرت اعجب بالاشخاص الغلظاء أو الرذلاء شرط أن يكونوا مثيرين للاهتمام .”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“It was easy to see that he was clever and well read, but he was also boring.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“لا تكافح تحت أي ظرف كان . الكفاح جهل ! إنها حكمة فطرية . اتبع مشاعرك فقط و افعل ماتحبه.
يرد تيد بيأس : إذا اتبعت مشاعري اللعينة سوف يفسد كل شيء”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“England's a nice place if you're rich, but otherwise it's a fucking swamp of prejudice, class confusion, the whole thing.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“For him in India the British were ridiculous, stiff, unconfident, rule-bound. And he'd made me feel that we couldn't allow ourselves the shame of failure in front of these people. You couldn't let the ex-colonialists see you on your knees, for that was where they expected you to be. They were exhausted now; their Empire was gone; their day was done and it was our turn.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“Selbst die Verwandten der Berühmten [sind] berühmt, denn Ruhm [ist] erblich.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“I’d send Eleanor a dignified note. Then I’d have to fall out of love with her. That was the rough part. Everything in life is organized around people falling in love with each other. Falling is easy; but no one tells you how to fall out of love. I didn’t know where to begin.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

“Women are brought up to think of others. [...] When I start to think of myself I feel sick.”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia

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“I now pronounce you husband and wife.
I hadn’t considered the kiss. Not once. I suppose I’d assumed it would be the way a wedding kiss should be. Restrained. Appropriate. Mild. A nice peck. Save the real kisses for later, when you’re deliciously alone. Country club girls don’t make out in front of others. Like gum chewing, it should always be done in private, where no one else can see.
But Marlboro Man wasn’t a country club boy. He’d missed the memo outlining the rules and regulations of proper ways to kiss in public. I found this out when the kiss began--when he wrapped his loving, protective arms around me and kissed me like he meant it right there in my Episcopal church. Right there in front of my family, and his, in front of Father Johnson and Ms. Altar Guild and our wedding party and the entire congregation, half of whom were meeting me for the first time that night. But Marlboro Man didn’t seem to care. He kissed me exactly the way he’d kissed me the night of our first date--the night my high-heeled boot had gotten wedged in a crack in my parents’ sidewalk and had caused me to stumble. The night he’d caught me with his lips.
We were making out in church--there was no way around it. And I felt every bit as swept away as I had that first night. The kiss lasted hours, days, weeks…probably ten to twelve seconds in real time, which, in a wedding ceremony setting, is a pretty long kiss. And it might have been longer had the passionate moment not been interrupted by the sudden sound of a person clapping his hands.
“Woohoo! All right!” the person shouted. “Yes!”
It was Mike. The congregation broke out in laughter as Marlboro Man and I touched our foreheads together, cementing the moment forever in our memory. We were one; this was tangible to me now. It wasn’t just an empty word, a theological concept, wishful thinking. It was an official, you-and-me-against-the-world designation. We’d both left our separateness behind. From that moment forward, nothing either of us did or said or planned would be in a vacuum apart from the other. No holiday would involve our celebrating separately at our respective family homes. No last-minute trips to Mexico with friends, not that either of us was prone to last-minute trips to Mexico with friends. But still.
The kiss had sealed the deal in so many ways.
I walked proudly out of the church, the new wife of Marlboro Man. When we exited the same doors through which my dad and I had walked thirty minutes earlier, Marlboro Man’s arm wriggled loose from my grasp and instinctively wrapped around my waist, where it belonged. The other arm followed, and before I knew it we were locked in a sweet, solidifying embrace, relishing the instant of solitude before our wedding party--sisters, cousins, brothers, friends--followed closely behind.
We were married. I drew a deep, life-giving breath and exhaled. The sweating had finally stopped. And the robust air-conditioning of the church had almost completely dried my lily-white Vera.”
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