Home > Author > Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
161 " She put on some music. Drum and flute, I think. She played it soft, because it was dreadfully late, a time when all good men and women, or at least the practical ones, had gone to bed. Then she danced for me. "
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni , Before We Visit the Goddess
162 " Sarojini admits he has a point; girls have to be toughened so they can survive a world that presses harder on women, and surely Bimal does a good job of that. But deep in a hidden place inside her that is stubborn as a mudfish, Sarojini knows she is right, too. Being loved a little more than necessary arms a girl in a different way. "
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni , Oleander Girl
163 " She did understand about sacrificing values for the sake of love. It was a lesson all mothers had to memorize. "
164 " made to the other women when I joined them at night. The pleasures that arise from sense-objects are bound to end, and thus they are only sources of pain. Don’t get attached to them. "
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni , The Palace of Illusions
165 " The pleasures that arise from sense-objects are bound to end, and thus they are only sources of pain. Don’t get attached to them. "
166 " Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one that we have dreamed into being. We love people when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not static like cutouts; sooner or later they change shape, leading to misunderstanding, loneliness and loss of love. "
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni , Queen of Dreams
167 " What is it in us that carves negative impressions so deeply into our brains? "
168 " It felt as though someone had reached into him and was wresting out his heart. In later life his sorrows would be deep-drawn and bone-aching sad, but never like this. Perhaps only the young can feel such exquisitely intense pain. "
169 " I long to stretch out on the sofa, wrapping myself in the red quilt that's lying there. Then, with a stab, I recognize the quilt. My father had brought it back from a business trip he took to New England long ago. Ironic, how objects remain in your life long after people have exited. "
170 " So many photos, so carefully preserved. How absurdly central I'd been to my mother's life. "
171 " After that, somehow, I began fixing things in my life. Dr Berger says being close to death will do that, but I'm not sure catalysts of change can be so easily identified. "
172 " I guess that's when people call their mothers - when their world is falling apart. "
173 " Pain, which is ultimately only like itself. "
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni , The Mistress of Spices
174 " til which fried in its own oil restores lustre when one has lost interest in life. I will be Tilottama, the essence of til, life-giver, restorer of health and hope. "
175 " Pain makes us crazy. All we want is to throw the live coal of it as far from us as we can, not thinking what we might set afire. "
176 " He who binds to himself a Joy Doth the wingèd life destroy; But he who kisses the Joy as it flies Lives in Eternity’s sunrise. "
177 " We had known it would be hard to leave this island of women where on our skin the warm rain fell like pomegranate seeds, where we woke to birdcall and slept to the First Mother’s singing, where we swam naked without shame in lakes of blue lotus. To exchange it for the human world whose harshness we remembered. But this? "
178 " Now that she no longer cares whether tears blotch her letter, she feels no need to weep. "
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni , The Unknown Errors of Our Lives
179 " Is the desire for vengeance stronger than the longing to be loved? What evil magic does it possess to draw the human heart so powerfully to it? "
180 " Bushes would pull in their sharp thorns and burst into flower when I watered them or loosened the earth around their roots. Squirrel-like creatures, their long white hair smooth as silk-thread, would scurry up to take berries from my palm. "
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni , The Forest of Enchantments