The God of Small Things, post 1

Just one chapter in and this book is magnificent.  Here are the quotes that have caught my eye and that I have underlined for the first chapter:

page 12:

     Yet Estha's silence was never awkward.  Never intrusive.  Never noisy.  It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence, as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.
     Over time he had aquired the ability to blend into the background of where he was - into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets - to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye.  It usually took strangers awhile to notice him even when they were in the same room with him.  It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke.  Some never noticed at all.
     Estha occupied very little space in the world.

page 13:

     Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha.  It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms.  It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat.  It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue.  It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked.  Unspeakable.  Numb.  And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world.  He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past.  Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.

page 14:

...steeped in the smell of old roses, blooded on memories of a broken man - the fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle.

page 17:

     It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined.

page 22:

She could hear the raucous, scrambled world inside his head.

page 32:

     Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day.  That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes.  And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house - the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture - must be resurrected from the ruins and examined.  Preserved.  Accounted for.
     Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted.  Imbued with new meaning .  Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

And this is just the first chapter!  These quotes mostly catch my eye because of her eloquence, her thoughts on life, or both.