Hana Quotes

“The English! They expect you to fight for them but won’t talk to you. Singh. And the ambiguities.”

“She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.”

“From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.”

“A novel is a mirror walking down a road…Many books open with an author’s assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle…But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat. When she begins a book, she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards.”

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.”

“She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”

“‘What do you hate most?’ he asks. ‘A lie. And you?’ ‘Ownership,’ he says. ‘When you leave me, forget me.’”