Top 70 Durga Chew-Bose Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “First love is all sensation and ambient zooms, and letting the world ebb. Like writing, occasionally, it feels combustive. Greedy. It’s unsophisticated and coaxes you into making promises about the far future and imbibing the moment. Into growing gullible fast, frantically so, and forgetting about yourself – about your exception. Writing does the same. It lays siege.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

2. “Nook people can overstate their love for a movie, having only watched it once. They are alert to how some spectacles become basically unbearable the second time. And, well, there are benefits to claiming something you’ve only experienced once as your favorite. It’s useful to have many favorites.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

3. “Or how staring at ocean water so blue, it leaves me bereft. In postcards, I’ll scribble “So blue!” because, what else?”

— Durga Chew-Bose

4. “Because nook people are turned on by and twig how terribly normal it is to drop out of life occasionally.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

5. “Sick for my body before. Before I’d ever noticed I was in possession of one. Before fulllengths. Before I knew anything about valleyed collarbones, a stomach’s folds, smooth legs, small wrists.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

6. “I don’t require much to feel far-removed; to impose my wanderings on what’s close. Because of this, my friend and I have started calling ourselves nook people. Those of us who seek corners and bays in order to redeploy our hearts and not break the mood. Those of us who retreat in order to cubicle our flame. Who collect sea glass. Who value a deep pants pocket. Who are our own understudies and may as well have shadowboxes for brains.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

7. “And in those moments when the two of them are playing dead, I quietly climb back upstairs because, as time passes and as I spot my parents doing young, lighthearted things, I’m overrun by some cruel and preoccupying sense that I’m watching the memory of them.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

8. “The whole Esther Williams of it all. The ostrich ballet. Like pirouetting feather dusters; their paddle feet in fourth position.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

9. “Nook people express appreciation in the moment by maintaining how much we will miss what is presently happening. Our priorities are spectacularly disordered. A nook person might spend the last few years of her twenties thinking she is dying. Convinced of it. Nook.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

10. “A nook person finds the dog at the party; drinks wine from a mug; sits on the floor and braids carpet tassels only to become self-conscious and unbraid them.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

11. “Nook people are those of us who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

12. “At any rate, isn’t it lovely to, once in a while, feel small in the presence of your friend? Awed. Fortunate to experience nearness that calls upon space.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

13. “That spiked measure of awe – of oof – feels like a general slowing, even though what’s really taking place is nothing short of a general quickening. The sheer, ensorcelled panic of feeling moved. Infirmed by what switches me on but also awake and unexpectedly cured. Similar to how sniffing a lemon when I’m carsick heals.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

14. “A woman carries her inner life – lugs it around or holds it in fumes that both poison and bless her – while nourishing another’s inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

15. “Even when I was nothing, I was arriving.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

16. “In childhood, having a sister, especially if she was older, meant sharing a wall with – it’s possible – some likeness of your near-future self. Movies, books, the March sisters, all of it, devised a rubric that engrossed me because sisterhood amounted to what I envied: not having to learn how to join.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

17. “Writing is losing focus and winning it back, only to lose it once more.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

18. “Writing is a closed pistachio shell.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

19. “Even when a thought springs fresh in my mind on the subway and solves an essay I’d just about abandoned. On the rare occasion my subconscious welds, language has a gift, I’ve learned, for humiliating those luminous random acts of creative flash into impossible-to-secure hobbling duds. The best ideas outrun me. That’s why I write.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

20. “Smallness can make you feel extra porous. Extra ambitious. Like a small dog carrying an enormous branch clenched in its teeth, as if intimating to the world: Okay. Where to?”

— Durga Chew-Bose

21. “There’s strength in observing one’s miniaturization. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn’t smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance, the momentum gained from reading a great book. After after, sitting, sleeping, living in its consequence. A book that makes you feel, finally, latched on.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

22. “There’s a type of inborn initiative that comes from having never been obligated to answer questions about one’s name, or one’s country of so-called origin, or to explain the way you look is generationally and geographically worlds apart from where you were born. Since childhood, there’s been this assumption that I owe strangers an answer when they inquire about matters I myself struggle to have words for, let alone understand.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

23. “It still comes as a shock to me how irreversible life is. How there’s no going back to whatever version of me existed before I saw that movie – the kind that switches me on to new streaks of consciousness by showing me a woman I feel strangely, formerly, acquainted with.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

24. “How it’s frantic enough to summon past jealousies, no matter how beyond them you think you are.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

25. “Because there is trust too, in feeling small.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

26. “Is there something to be learned from fast tenderness that wanes just as fast as it forms?”

— Durga Chew-Bose

27. “Memory is trust open to doubt.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

28. “Even then, when time decelerates and the relative importance of our lives, of our hurry, undergoes a sudden, essential audit; even then, our heart never stops.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

29. “Then again, maybe that’s why I’m drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

30. “Until you write what is detectable but dislodges you. Like the smell of cinnamon.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

31. “Or when I meet someone new who loves a movie just as I’ve loved that movie; who speaks at such a clip about it – tenderly, contagiously – that I forget to speak at all and smile like a fool because, now and then, meeting new people isn’t so terrible. Even.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

32. “What I enjoy is this. Responding to an artist’s work as if it were a missive. A film can be a fling I’ll cool with sentences I address to the director but that I’ll tuck into this essay instead.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

33. “Even when I’m caught off guard by a lathery shade of peach on the bottom corner of a painting at the Met, as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors, and how there’s more to see, and how one color’s newness can invalidate all of my sureness.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

34. “She is all at once unused but oh, so used up. Or very used to. Why is it that when a woman is occupied by the voice in her head, or the wear of her day, or the landscape that passes through her eyes like windows on a train, the world assumes she is up for grabs? A vacant stare does not mean vacancy.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

35. “Even then, when I felt tremendously sad in my lovely dress, my heart did not stop.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

36. “Nook people know the words to a movie by heart but never say them out loud because anticipation is an asset. Because there’s no interrupting Katharine Hepburn when she’s interrupting herself: “Aren’t the geraniums pretty, Professor?”

— Durga Chew-Bose

37. “They experienced the world, I supposed, as I experienced going to the movies: that flash of amazement petitioned, in part, from feeling small in the presence of bigness.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

38. “The best ideas outrun me. That’s why I write.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

39. “My quick-summoned first love – how everything was enough because I knew so little but felt cramped with certainty – is, I’m afraid, just like writing. That is to say, what can transpire if writing becomes a reason for living outside the real without prying it open. How, like first love, writing can be foiling, agitated, totally addictive. Sweet, insistent, jeweled. Consuming though rarely nourishing. A new tactility.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

40. “When those fault lines inside of us quake on account of all that is built up and unkempt between two people in love – on account of perceptiveness and wariness resembling in tone.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

41. “Resurfacing is nonpareil. And splitting a sandwich with someone you’ve said maybe two words to all morning is idyllic.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

42. “I’ve felt infinity too, late in my twenties, when I discovered a word in English I’d only ever known in Bengali. Or when I spot, with hours still left in the day, the moon’s hazy thumbprint. How the moon enjoys debunking the day.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

43. “These women who perhaps even balk at the word survival and favor instead a far more fluctuant current: continuance.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

44. “Memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. Memory isn’t a well but an offshoot. It goes secretly. Comes apart. Deceives. It’s guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you’ve emotionalized.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

45. “Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment. Letting form pass through you.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

46. “It’s as though I miscarried all that glee we are entitled to in childhood.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

47. “It’s imperative that writing consists of not living up to your own taste. Of leaving the world behind so you can hold fast to what’s strange inside; what’s unlit. A soreness. A neglected joy. The way forward is perhaps not maintaining a standard for accuracy but appraising what naturally heaps. Writing.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

48. “Is my function to reach zero and leave nothing in the way of obstructing truth? Or to tender what’s still shapeless? The baggy fit of feelings before they’ve found their purpose. How can I present what’s, for now, finished, while also taking comfort in knowing it will evolve? That these words are only materials; provisions for keeping me observant and hopefully light-footed enough to plan my next project. My next many.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

49. “A remembrance of what’s impossible to remember. A sixth sense I’ve long guessed is special to those who are born with leftover matter ferrying them rearward. We’re the type who ask too many questions – an irritating amount, really. But who ask without claim or exigency. The want is the want and it goes on like that. My prelude was a waltz Dulcie loved to dance. She and Felix then, are like Etta James in concert: potential energy.”

— Durga Chew-Bose

50. “Isn’t it fun to read a sentence that races ahead of itself?”

— Durga Chew-Bose