More Things in Heaven and Earth Quotes

“This wasn’t just lust or infatuation, this was intoxication, a craven’s craving I could not explain. But then, what was love but a want of the flesh, or a want of the soul. I wanted this man. I couldn’t not want him. I couldn’t not breathe. I wanted him in a way that was so absolute I couldn’t care if he didn’t want me back the same way.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Grief isn’t elegant. It is messy, snot-nosed, feral, aching. A beast that slobbers into one’s sane moments and scratches the door of one’s composure insistently, demanding to be let out.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“When you finally gather the courage to release what you’ve been hanging on to for a while, you realise it is not just a release, but also a relief. It frees you to find something else to hold on to, something else that was also waiting to be held.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Miss was a word that couldn’t quite express the hollow pit of my stomach filled with nothing but cold gusts of air where the intestines should have been, walking around with a gaping hole in my chest where my heart had been pulled out from, feeling hollow within and without. It was a missing that filled me up, an absence that was a presence, a bereavement that wasn’t a release.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“And I would let him go and let him return. Over and over again, until there were no spaces between him going and returning and the rhythm of our coming together and separating made a music all its own that would fill through my days of waiting.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“We could love, I realized, without the promise of exclusivity that one had been raised on. And there was no shame or guilt in that, it was just the way the human heart was, four-chambered, with an infinite capacity to contain others, more than it could contain itself.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“The waters were getting higher every year, they told me. The world, beyond this canopy of green, ringed by the incoming sea and the outgoing river, was changing. Perhaps, here I would be safe from the change I didn’t want to be part of. Falling off the radar was easy.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“When I looked in the mirror today, I saw a stranger. The woman staring back at me as unblinkingly confident. She had found her centre. Her eyes were calm and did not brim over with the saltiness of the soul that often anymore. She was at peace. I was at peace.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Perhaps there was nothing to be said, and there was nothing to be heard. Perhaps all we were destined to be were moths to the flame, burn ourselves out in the pursuit of the next light we saw. This light had burnt me out. And all I could do was wait till I rose, phoenix-like, only to be burnt again.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Was this what I wanted, the rest of my days being laid out for me? A life not of my choosing. Would I be able to live it out here, in this isolation, six months on an island, the days unfolding one into another, a series of Russian dolls, diminishing in their intensity and diminishing me as well. Would I be diminished? Or was this what I needed, to live here undisturbed for the rest of my life and never have to interact with the fractiousness of city living ever again?”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“You travel around the world only to come home, they say. Stay where you are and
make it home.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“All I had was a wary belief that there were more things in heaven and earth, as the Bard said, that one could explain. And perhaps we were not meant to explain these, perhaps we were only meant to
experience these, live through them, and emerge, bearing on our bodies and our souls the carbuncles of the lived experience,
now fastened onto our selves.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Creatures from the damp earth emerged from their homes in the ground, slithering
away on the damp overgrown grass, onto the stairs, the patio and squirming their way into the house. Survival, it was, risking
being squashed underfoot over being drowned in their homes.
Earthworms, snails, small snakes, insects. Life survived seasons and inundations, and poured itself out onto higher ground.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Memories are nothing other than ghosts of our past selves that haunt us. Ghosts are nothing more than memories trying to get our attention.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“I was carried along by his optimism. Or perhaps I was carried along by him. It is dangerous to be carried along by a person. People change.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Was I going to be living here permanently now? I didn’t know. What was permanent anyway, except where temporary stopped, and weren’t we all just temporary in our residence on this planet,
in this dimension, anyway?”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Home was perhaps just this body I inhabited and this too was alien to me at times, its folds and creases, its pains and needs. Home was everywhere and
nowhere. Home, I realised now, was anywhere the heart slept in peace. Home was where one unpacked one’s cares and settled them into the wardrobe with one’s clothes. It was where one was complete.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Who was to say where the river ended and the sea began, water flowed into itself and the sweet became the salty, where the brine and the riverine coagulated and became the ocean, primordial churn, from the beginning of time and earth and life."
– Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“There are no ghosts, Pappa said. But Maa always smiled softly when he said
so. There were ghosts, she knew amongst the living and the dead, ghosts of the living and the dead, and often one couldn’t tell the two apart.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“I had come to this city because I wanted
to disappear into its amorphous multitudes of people who didn’t know me. I wanted to be seen only when I chose to be seen.
Cities allowed you that, they took you in like quicksand and spat you out if they found you indigestible.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“When you lose a spouse, no one tells you about the other loss, the loss that the body must deal with. That of a body against a body. Of sweat, of scent, of bliss.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Grief is grey and damp, a marshland of emotions that suck you in, tendrils of mist that caress you, asphyxiate you.
Grieving is the journey you do alone, a penitence, a pilgrimage, an affirmation of being alive in the face of death that shadows
us, every waking moment. Grief was the country I was on a
pilgrimage within, searching for redemption from my grieving.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“How did other women come to terms with losing a husband? Did they pick up the pieces of their shattered selves and glue
them back together, sealing the joints with metal to prevent them from falling apart again at the slightest whiff of remembrance, motes of a residual ghost perfume, familiar and overwhelming
in a just-vacated elevator, a familiar stretch of shoulder and head in a distance, in a crowd, snatches of a song that had been
playing when….”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Sometimes life gives you angels in power suits and shoulder pads when angels with wings desert you without a by your leave.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“There was a purgatory on earth that we the
living wandered into, clinging on to the memories of the person, breathing in the clothes still hanging in the closet until time
gently ameliorates their fragrance, blending it into the sameness of air. Our ghosts resided there, in that closet. Few of us had
the courage to shut that door, to lock it, to never peep into it again, to let the ghosts swirl within the closed confines desperate
for release. We kept returning to peek into those closets in our heads, we kept letting our ghosts out.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth