One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter Quotes

“There is no cowardice in removing yourself from a wildly unhealthy and unwinnable situation . . . You shouldn't feel like you have to play . . . you don't owe anyone anything. You don't have to be available to everyone. You can stop.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you're in.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“I was never in danger. Nothing bad can happen to you if you're with your mom. Your mom can stop a bullet from lodging in your heart. She can prop you up when you can't. You mom is your blood and bone before your body even knows how to make any.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“The mistake we make is in thinking rape isn’t premeditated, that it happens by accident somehow, that you’re drunk and you run into a girl who’s also drunk and half-asleep on a bench and you sidle up to her and things get out of hand and before you know it, you’re being accused of something you’d never do. But men who rape are men who watch for the signs of who they believe they can rape. Rape culture isn’t a natural occurrence; it thrives thanks to the dedicated attention given to women in order to take away their security. Rapists exist on a spectrum, and maybe this attentive version is the most dangerous type: women are so used to being watched that we don’t notice when someone’s watching us for the worst reason imaginable. They have a plan long before we even get to the bar to order our first drink.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Our story was delightful in its mundanity: we met, it worked, we're trying.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Mom talks about moving to Canada as though my father had requested she start wearing fun hats. "Why not try it?" she thought, instead of "This fucking lunatic wants me to go to a country made of ice and casual racism.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“It changes you, when you see someone similar to you doing the thing you might want to do yourself. That kind of writing--writing by people that aren't in the majority--its sheer visibility on your bookshelf or your television or your internet, is sometimes received similarly to my call for more of that work. It's responded to with racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia. We are deeply afraid of making marginalized voices stronger, because we think it makes privileged ones that much weaker.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Mom has reorganized the kitchen so that the one room that was everyone's room is foreign to me. My visits are punctuated with me whipping around, angrily demanding, "Where are the forks, WHY DID YOU MOVE THE FORKS?" and she has to calmly open the drawer on the other side of the kitchen as if she moved it just to ruin my life. I just found out where she puts the bowls and their new location feels like such a personal attack that I can barely talk about it without raising my blood pressure.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“The great irony of growing up is that it’s often once you leave your parents’ home that you understand them the most. You get less angry; they get less anxious.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Your mom is your blood and bone before your body even knows how to make any.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays

“People allow India to exist only in two versions: In the first, everything is too beautiful to be encapsulated, women are swarthy and hippy, shoeless boys play soccer in dirt roads, elephants roam the streets, and temples are merely there for your enjoyment. In the second, India is a country lurching forward awkwardly, suffering a rape epidemic, incapable of a feminist movement or proper health care, a place where people shit and piss in the streets, where the caste system has ruined entire generations, where poverty is so rampant and depressing that you'll hardly make it out with your soul intact, where your IT centre is based, a place just close enough to Pakistan or Iraq or Afghanistan to be scary, but stable enough to be fun and exotic. Because, boy, isn't the food good, and aren't the landmarks something, and hasn't everyone there figured out a kind of profound meditative inner peace that we should all learn from? Like all things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. A place, any place, can be beautiful and perfect and damaged and dangerous at the same time.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Immigrant parents, when they first move to North America, push towards whiteness, towards assimilation, to survive and thrive. Naturally, their children do too for the first half of their lives. This usually tips the other way, but before we're taught anything, we're taught to hide.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“It's not fun to have sympathy for the people who are trying to hurt you.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“People would see me on the street, shoving fistfuls of Teddy Grahams into my mouth on the way to the podiatrist, and they would think, "Boy, that lady sure does have her life together.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Brown people rarely explain how anyone is related to anyone. You’re simply told that these people are your family and to treat them as such.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you're racist or sexist or small-minded.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“I'm not white, no, but I'm just close enough that I could be, and just far enough that you know I'm not. I can check off a diversity box for you and I don't make you nervous - at least not on the surface. I'm the whole package!”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“And while Canada purports to be multicultural, Toronto in particular, a place where everyone is holding hands and cops are handing out ice cream cones instead of, say, shooting black men, our inability to talk about race and its complexities actually means our racism is arguably more insidious. We rarely acknowledge it, and when we do, we're punished, as if we're speaking badly of an elderly relative who can't help but make fun of the Irish. The white majority doesn't like being reminded that the cultural landscape is still flawed, still broken...”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“The only way to do better, to have better, is to lose pieces of what was. It's inevitable that you can't bring everything with you, like carrying water in your cupped hands from one river to another. There are too many cracks, and if you're so eager to move, you'll just have to get used to new water.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“She used to call me on the phone and scream, “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, I AM GOING TO CHOP YOU INTO PIECES SO SMALL, YOU WILL BE A POWDER AND NO ONE WILL FIND YOU.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Did I mention Indian weddings last seven days? There are prison sentences that run shorter than Indian weddings.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Travelling tells the world that you’re educated, that you’re willing to take risks, that you have earned your condescension.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays

“I have never had to be brave. Bravery is for parents and people who get tattoos in another language or dare to eat pinkish chicken.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“(I am Carmen Sandiego in this fantasy, like I am in most of my non-sexual, non-food-related fantasies.)”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays

“Plenty of people take a gap year between high school and university to travel, or spend a summer back-packing through Europe to “find” themselves. (A bullshit statement if ever there was one. Where do you think you’ll be? No one finds anything in France except bread and pretension, and frankly, both of those are in my lap right now.)”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays

“I peeled the shorts off my sweating skin and stepped into the skirt. It slid up my body, resting on my waist, and I pulled the zipper up towards the lord. It didn't just fit. No, it did more than that. It melded to my body, beautifully, as if it had been cut specifically for me, to mask and smooth and elevate. I would be better in this skirt. The dream was happening! I had the all-knowing smile, my hair was suddenly more luxurious, I felt thinner, more acceptable. Girls who had been mean to me in high school would see me in this skirt and think, "Is that Scaachi?" and I'd say, "YOU BET IT IS, YOU DUMB BITCH" and then punch all their boyfriends in the teeth. (I have not thought this fantasy through; just let me have this.)”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“It's taxing to consider the circumstances that can take an unmarked human canvas and make it rage-filled and petty and lost. It's not fun to have sympathy for the people who are trying to hurt you. But their actions can sometimes make sense: what's easier than trying to get better is trying to break something else down.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Mom used to tell me that white people don't understand us, would never understand us, even when they are well-meaning and patient...I thought she was being reductive and unforgiving, but she might have known something I didn't: how do I explain to [my white boyfriend], who feels only love and little obligation, that my life comes with an excess of the latter? You marry into this, whether you like it or not.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“But most unsettling is how this time I notice my own fairness. I notice that while I might be a person of colour among the diaspora back home, or in any white-majority country, here I am the white person. Kashmiris are notable because there are so few of us left, and because we've taken up a privileged space in India. In Toronto, some Indian cab drivers will ask me where my family is from, and when I tell them, they think they're bonding with me when they talk about how much they hate Muslims. Or, in the case that the driver is Muslim, he'll try to bond with me over the trouble with 'the blacks.' All of us struggle towards whiteness.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you're in”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter