Top 41 Bharati Mukherjee Quotes
#1. In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have.
Bharati Mukherjee
#2. [On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.
Bharati Mukherjee
#4. My mother's rules had to do with feminine deportment, so I never played hard enough to break a toy or muddy my dress. My father's rules had to do with never shaming the family by even a hint of scandal, and not providing business rivals with an opportunity to kidnap me or throw acid in my face.
Bharati Mukherjee
#5. In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.
Bharati Mukherjee
#6. I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
Bharati Mukherjee
#7. Where, in Heaven's name, could anyone even be alone in Calcutta? What hanky-panky business, in my mother's words, could go on? Everyone knew the rules and the rules stated caste and community narrowed the range of intimate contact.
Bharati Mukherjee
#8. It's making life important, making a single life important, rather than having a prescription for the global ills which afflict us.
Bharati Mukherjee
#9. I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.
Bharati Mukherjee
#10. Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.
Bharati Mukherjee
#11. The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave.
Bharati Mukherjee
#12. Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.'
Bharati Mukherjee
#13. What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?
Bharati Mukherjee
#15. I never have my CNN off, it's on the whole day. I don't want to be out of range of television. I'm constantly bombarded by information - Somalia one second, Haiti the next - I need that constant pounding. I couldn't write without television. I need to have the world in my room.
Bharati Mukherjee
#16. We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It's a question of time, not motive.
Bharati Mukherjee
#17. There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.
Bharati Mukherjee
#18. Rebellion sounded like a lot of fun, but in Calcutta there was nothing to rebel against. Where would it get you?
Bharati Mukherjee
#19. Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.'
Bharati Mukherjee
#20. I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.
Bharati Mukherjee
#21. My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload.
Bharati Mukherjee
#23. You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new person ... What America offers me is romanticism and hope ... Suddenly, I found myself in a country where
Bharati Mukherjee
#24. I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.
Bharati Mukherjee
#25. I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'
Bharati Mukherjee
#26. But, Christ, there's a difference between exotic and foreign, isn't there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me.
Bharati Mukherjee
#27. Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one's individuality.
Bharati Mukherjee
#28. I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me.
Bharati Mukherjee
#29. I don't feel the depression the people who are always looking back to the '50s, to 'Father Knows Best' feel. I can see the coming of another glorious era.
Bharati Mukherjee
#30. My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.
Bharati Mukherjee
#31. The United States exists as a sovereign nation. 'America,' in contrast, exists as a myth of democracy and equal opportunity to live by, or as an ideal goal to reach.
Bharati Mukherjee
#32. I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'
Bharati Mukherjee
#33. In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.
Bharati Mukherjee
#34. I thought of America as Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner sprawled on the edge of a Hollywood swimming pool biting into the same red apple.
Bharati Mukherjee
#35. I have to put down roots where I decide to stay. It wasn't enough for me to be an expatriate Indian in Canada. If I can't feel that I can make social, political and emotional commitments to a place, I have to find another place.
Bharati Mukherjee
#36. The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.
Bharati Mukherjee
#37. A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.
Bharati Mukherjee
#38. Love on the decline is hard to tell from love on the rise." [From 'The Lady from Lucknow']
Bharati Mukherjee
#39. The divorced Indian lady combines every fantasy about the liberated, wicked Western woman with the safety net of basic submissive familiarity.
Bharati Mukherjee
#40. Lepers were a common sight all over India and in every part of Calcutta, but extending help beyond dropping a coin or two into their rag-wrapped stumps was not. As a child I was convinced even touching a spot a leper had rubbed against would lead to infection.
Bharati Mukherjee
#41. I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship.
Bharati Mukherjee
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