Three true things

It's rare that I actually get to see the genesis of a meme. Kirsty's blog post of three true things she'd recently read in fiction really inspired me, and triggered a strong response from Genevieve of reeling and writhing and others too, and so this meme has emerged.

The idea is to post three true things you've read recently that are from fiction:

1.

"They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away."

– Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, p. 52.

2.

"Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter."

– Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, p. 53.

3.

Outside the playground, in the open park, with the hill rising up in front of him and the sky beyond it, he felt like walking forwards for a long time with his eyes closed, leaving everyone behind, in order, for a bit, to have no thoughts. For years, before his children were born, he seemed to have forfeited Sundays altogether. Now the poses, the attitude, the addictions and, worst of all, the sense of unlimited time, had been replaced by a kind of exhausting chaos and a struggle, in his mind, to work out what he should be doing, and who he had to be to satisfy others.

– Hanif Kureishi, from his short story 'Hullabaloo in the Tree'.

As you can tell, I've recently re-read The God of Small Things some 10 years after I first read it. And I have enjoyed more about it now. I downloaded Kureishi's story off his website some time back and found it as I sorted through my desk this morning, and remembered how struck I was by it. So it pipped the Rushdie excerpt I originally thought to include. I've raved about Kureishi's story before. I actually found it hard to limit this meme to three true things, so I'll probably revisit this theme sometime.

I'm tagging Matthew Smith from Smithology (because I'm curious what truths he may find in the sci-fi he blogs about) and Mike Lynch from Nannygoat Hill.