There is a distasteful air of the outlaw that accompanies the idea of a writer in my husband’s mind. A self-centeredness about writing that doesn’t fit with his image of a revolutionary. It has the one-word job description : defiance. I’ve never felt such a dangerous attraction towards anything else in my life.

I think what you know in a language shows who you are in relation to that language. Not an instance of language shaping your worldview, but its obtuse inverse, where your worldview shapes what parts of the language you pick up. Not just : your language makes you, your language holds you prisoner to a particular way of looking at the world. But also : who you are determines what language you inhabit, the prison-house of your existence permits you only to access and wield some parts of a language.

Just because this is a novel set in rural India, do not expect a herd of buffalo to walk across every page for the sake of authenticity.

I am the woman conjured up to take on the life of a woman afraid of facing her own reality.

And I am thinking about how I am someday going to be writing all this out and I am conscious that I am thinking about this and not about the moment, and I know that I have already escaped the present and that gives me hope, I just have to wait for this to end and I can write again, and I know that because I am going to be writing about this, I know this is going to end.

I am the woman who is willing to display her scars and put them within exhibition frames. I am the madwoman of moon days. I am the breast-beating woman who howls. I am the woman who wills the skies to weep in my place.

You have a big man’s never she tells him. You need a old man’s patience.

Let me tell you something that goes against popular wisdom. Love is not blind; it just looks in the wrong places.

No one treats us as writers, only as diarists who survived.

They said even hawks could not carry away the sky, so scavenger crows like us should not have lofty dreams.