Shenaz Treasury Quotes

I went into the family business. To me, it was the norm and not the exception.

My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

My dad's a photographer. So I suppose he named me Ansel just in case I would take over the family business. I guess I failed him.

In the India I was growing up in, history wasn't really a wise career option. People would joke and say, 'History's okay, but what's your actual job?' I didn't come from a privileged background and couldn't afford to be irresponsible, so I did the pragmatic thing and did a MBA.

Tradition is an element that enters into play with destiny, because you are born into a particular family - Jewish or Islamic or Christian or Mexican - and your family determines to some extent what you are expected to become. And society is always there attempting to determine the role we will play within it.

I always saw myself working for the family business.

Dad was convinced always that I was going to be a road sweeper.

I don't know why people feel the need to do this to me, but my friend asked my dad, 'Aren't your proud of Jimmy now that he's a successful actor?' And my dad was like, 'No, not really. I wish he was a scientist.' I guess scientist is more noble in the Asian culture.

There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.

Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.

I keep saying, 'Don't change. Be who you are,' but society is really strong in their opinions.

Everything you think you're supposed to feel even, or do. When it doesn't match up with what everything that the culture is telling you to do, you feel like a failure.

We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.

It is really a hard life. Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

I had to run away from home in order to be a musician. Because I came from a family of... my father was a health inspector; my mother was a social worker. And I was pretty smart in school. So they expected me to be some kind of academic - schoolteacher, or doctor, lawyer - and they were very disappointed when I told them I wanted to be a musician.

I think a single woman's biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off!

As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

Oh, Herbert," she said pleadingly to her silent husband, "you must make him marry her! Call for the parson immediately! Look at them... they are...," she sputtered, "canoodling!

because everybody lies. It's part of living in society .

The stunning part was that one time Neil McElroy the Secretary of Defense who was the father of one of our classmates spoke and basically at commencement, he told us all that our job after graduation was to get married and have interesting sons...and we all found that hard to believe.

That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!

I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?