“There would remain no sign of you ever having played in this house. Your childhood is going to be swept under a camel-skin rug and elevators are going to be built over the lake we once swam in. This address, as we know it, would be lost forever and we’ll wake up in a box-sized room: cramped, trampled and sensationally unhappy.'('Left from Dhakeshwari')”

“Ah, Jenks? It’s not a lake, it’s a friggin’ freshwater ocean. Did you see the size of the tanker going under the bridge when we came into town? The wake from it could tip us. I’m not canoeing it unless your name is Pocahontas.”

“We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it was someone's real life, and for once that someone wasn't just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was our life, the only one we were going to have.”

“Livia rubbed Blake’s unresponsive hands and talking of their future. “Blake, we’ll walk in the woods together. We have forever. Just wake up, okay? That’s the deal we’re making right here. You wake up and we get to have forever.”

“You see, Dimitri and I, we are both suffering from ennui! We have still the match-boxes. But at last one gets tired even of match-boxes. Besides, our collection will soon be complete. And then what are we going to do?"'Oh, Madame!' I exclaimed, touched by the moral unhappiness of this pretty person, 'if you only had a son, then you would know what to do. You would then learn the purpose of your life, and your thoughts would become at once more serious and yet more cheerful.''But I have a son,' she replied. 'He is a big boy; he is eleven years old, and he suffers from ennui like the rest of us. Yes, my George has ennui, too; he is tired of everything. It is very wretched.”

“When we were children, Bapi used to dress us up in the same clothes, going to Apsara for ‘Titanic’ or reruns of ‘Dadar Kirti’ and we used to be so embarrassed by that, even at six. Day before yesterday when I saw Neev and you wearing matching purple shirts, I encountered envy for the first time. You had taken on his colors, as though you were in his house already. I felt as though that moment you had stopped needing me to make you feel whole and nothing was ever going to remain the same.’('Left from Dhakeshwari')”