Quarterlife Quotes

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Quarterlife Quarterlife by Devika Rege
161 ratings, 3.89 average rating, 35 reviews
Quarterlife Quotes Showing 1-15 of 15
“Wear all the masks you want, just don’t be surprised by your face when it catches you in a mirror.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“She was merely responding to the violent love you feel for an ideal before you abandon it, like the violent love you feel for a person before you leave him.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“From a sedan windscreen, a wide-angle view of a street. The scene is slipping into a strange perspective, as if she were seeing it all, herself included, from a disembodied eye as urgent and unsteady as a surveillant camera on a mission.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“The only way to comprehend Deonar is to break it down into an endless archive of shots.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“The only images of real value, she thinks, are the rejects – outtakes overwhelmed by the sun or blurred by dust, cropped edges with chaotic lines and broken faces – for the only honest composition inspired by such rupture is one that fails.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“To get the scent of what’s next, and how to tweak and hoist it towards what should be, that’s what he’s about, and he has sensed that it is in heartland writers and English subtitles that his generation will find its tongue.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“The managers share an intimacy like that of newlyweds in an arranged marriage, not one built over time but the result of a near-identical background.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“He never mentions his caste but jokes about his intolerance for spice; he introduces himself not as Naren but Agashe;”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“Rohit says with the confidence of that age when you discover the pleasure of opinion, and surprised to find adults listening, you fall in love with your voice.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“he pushes the Marathi in his heart through the Hindi in his head out the English on his tongue:”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“And here he is now, calling Andrei to help with the oven, his ambition to see his little girl become anything more than a research assistant to her aunt or live further than his old cabin suppressed by the fear he will never articulate: that he needs her and her unborn children to keep him from isolation, irrelevance, death.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“Now he gets the value of the everyday stuff in the Peshwa museums. What is the culture of a place or people other than this - how we lived and how we died? What is an identity butt an accretion of all those sensations, however fleeting or slight, aroused by every encounter with the world that tells you where and among whom you belong… or do not?”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“At her final dinner in Imperial Heights, she notices afresh all that a week has made familiar: the silk runner, the brass casseroles, and the many little bowls on her plate that Sita, already turning invisible, keeps refilling. The meal is elaborate. There is saag paneer because it is her favourite Indian dish; corn bake, should the curry get too spicy; what she now knows is dal, not soup; yogurt, rotis, pilaf rice and pickle. Her first night here, she asked what order to eat things in, and everyone laughed like it was the most charming thing to say. Tonight, she folds her roti into a roll, one bite for each spoonful of curry, and as the subject of her new rental in Santacruz leads to a discussion on the city's suburbs, she feels reassured that Nana is right, people are people; no matter where you go and how confusing or daunting or hilarious they seem, there is always room to be kindred.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“Chitra Kaki's gestures are a result of ritual, house pride and belonging, all of which precede love, and this thought makes his joy in the modak more acute.
...Their generation has seen more change than he can imagine, their desire to be progressive is more endearing than their lapses or confusion, and he wants to love them like when he was a child, that is, to not only love but also respect them as valid ways of being.”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
“Dusk. They park at the edge of a wide, sandy bank. Omkar hums Shanth wahate Krishna-mai. He says the lyrics mean that a truly great person is as quiet as the river Krishna. It's the same river at Menavali Ghat, but here she is in full sweep, dark and slow under the clouds. This is where Ek Sangharsh ends, with a teenaged Omkar watching the river surge past the Dhom dam and leave the town.
Standing next to Omkar, he feels a new reverence for this water and soil. Then Omkar takes his hand... and it's just a simpler, sweeter kind of friendship, the kind made in school, intense but free of homophobia, so it's nothing if, an hour later, he is resting like this, his head on Omkar's thigh, the mist coming down the hills on all sides. Beneath them, the Krishna is swelling. He has a quart of rum on his chest since it's 'the thing to do on the dam', not that Omkar drinks. Omkar is telling stories of pranks from his schooldays, and the moment feels pure...”
Devika Rege, Quarterlife