Top 100 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes
#1. If you look back at the great classics and the epics and myths, they were for everyone. Different people got different things from them, but everyone was invited to participate.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#2. Or perhaps it is just that desire lies at the heart of human existence. When we turn away from one desire, we must find another to cleave to with all our strength
or else we die.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#4. Open yourself to the sight, and it will show you what you need to know. But never attempt to bend it to your will. Never pry into a particular life that has been brought to your care. That is to break trust.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#5. Try to remember that you are the instrument and I the doer. If you can hold on to this, no sin can touch you. Instrument,
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#6. Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#7. America is a country formed by diverse communities from different countries. Overall, the country is very hospitable and gives opportunities to grow. Saying that, I'd also say I'm not a 'white' immigrant; a South Asian's experience is different than, say, a European immigrant's.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#9. Often, writer's block will occur when I don't understand a character or his/her motivations. So I will make notes analysing characters.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#11. Dissolving differences has always been an important motive for my writing, right from 'The Mistress of Spices.'
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#12. India lends itself well to fictionalization, but ultimately, it all depends on the writer's imagination.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#13. Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as reality, an objective and untouched nature of being. Or if all that we encounter has already been changed by what we had imagined it to be. If we have dreamed it into being.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#14. I think, we all learned that when we are afraid it's easy to want to blame, and the people we want to blame are the people who don't look like us.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#17. I wrote 'Mistress of Spices' at an unusual time when I had a near-death experience after the birth of my second son.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#20. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#21. The choice they made in the moment of my need changed something in our relationship. I no longer depended on them so completely in the future. And when I took care to guard myself from hurt, it was as much from them as from our enemies.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#22. In many immigrant families, the parents are just talking and talking about the home country until the children are like, 'Oh, don't tell us any more.'
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#23. After September 11, 2001, I was feeling like I really wanted more understanding between cultures. It seemed to me that so much of what happened on September 11 was because people didn't understand each other and were suspicious of each other.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#24. I write best late at night, when everyone in the house has gone to bed. There's something magical about that late night silence that appeals to me.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#25. In community work, you reach some people, but in writing, I can reach many more people, not only in exploring issues of domestic violence, but also by showing the importance of strong women in communities.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#27. I want to weep too, not for me but for us all
for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#28. Danger will come upon us when it will. We can't stop it. We can only try to be prepared. There's no point in looking ahead to that danger and suffering its effects even before it comes to us.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#30. I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#33. I thought that if lokas existed at all, good women would surely go to one where men were not allowed so that they could be finally free of male demands.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#34. O exhilaration, I thought. To be lifted up through the eye of chaos, to balance breath-stopped on the edge of nothing. And the plunge that would follow, the shattering of my matchstick body to smithereens, the bones flying free as foam, the heart finally released.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#35. She lifts a bowl of kheer and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#36. As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#38. And the mother, who through all the years of her hardship had never shed a tear, wept at his trust and her deception.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#40. It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#41. I broke the first rule, the unwritten one, meant not just for warriors but all of us: I took love and used it as a balm to soothe my ego.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#43. All of us groping in caverns, our fingertips raw against stone, searching for that slight crack, the edge of a door opening into love.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#44. I've long been interested in the tale-within-a-tale phenomenon. I'm familiar with many tales which use this framework or the device of many people in one place, telling their stories, or multiple storytellers commenting on each others' stories with their own.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#45. 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
#46. My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#47. I had friends who died in the 9/11 tragedy; some of my friends lost family members in the aftermath of Godhra.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#48. Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people ... Fennel ... smelling of changes to come.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#50. Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you'll spend your life yearning for a man you can't have.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#55. I was about 12 when I first encountered 'The Moonstone' - or a Classics Illustrated version of it - digging through an old trunk in my grandfather's house on a rainy Bengali afternoon.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#57. Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the heart's dusty corners.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#58. Hi mam I am Divya studying 2nd year English I am doing research about you so please tell me the relation of Anand in Conch series which compared to foreign culture
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#59. Buddha's Wife tells a fascinating story, little known in the west, about the woman whom Buddha left behind. Gabriel Constans focuses the reader's attention on the strong and complicated women who surrounded Buddha and makes us re-think the nature of spiritual life.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#60. Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#61. You could also call it waking,' Krishna continues. 'Or intermission, as one scene in a play ends and the next hasn't yet begun.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#63. What is the most wondrous thing on earth? Each day countless humans enter the Temple of Death, yet the ones left behind continue to live as though they were immortal ... In
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#64. It's very important to balance things; it's imperative to do something for the society, and women in particular, and help women who aren't in position to help themselves.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#65. India has been a very accepting culture. We pride ourselves on that. That is a global truth. In fact, it forms a major theme in my books.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#66. A kshatriya woman's highest purpose in life is to support the warriors in her life: her father, brother, husband and sons.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#67. Rakhi likes the comfortable clutter of her life, the things she loves gathered around her like a shawl against the winterliness of the world.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#69. Sometimes
she knows this from her own life
to get to the other side, you must travel through grief. No detours are possible.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#71. Sometimes what is 'real' because it takes place in the physical world, like 9/11, is so unreal on the level of the soul. Then other things, which in terms of the physical world seem so magical and unbelievable, on the level of the soul seem very real.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#72. I came from a traditional family, and it was an exciting but challenging transition to move to America and live on my own. The world around me was suddenly so different.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#73. I interviewed a lot of people in India, and I asked my mother to send me a lot of Bengali books on the tradition of dream interpretation. It's a real way for me to remember how people think about things in my culture.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#75. I was very fortunate that all my holidays I'd spend with my grandfather, experiencing a much more traditional way of life and listening to these wonderful stories, which I now feel are such an important part of Indian thinking.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#76. As I remember my grandfather and those Christmas mornings he gave for a little girl's pleasure, I know that often a big life starts with doing small things.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#77. Looking back, I could not point to one special time and say, There! That's what is amazing. We can change completely and not recognize it. We think terrible events have made us into stone. But love slips in like a chisel - and suddenly it is an ax, breaking us into pieces from the inside.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#79. In the white marble hall of the hotel, I'm waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we're dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#80. I tried to hold on to this compassion, sensing its preciousness, but even as I reached to grasp it, it dissipated into wisps. No revelation can endure unless it is bolstered by a calm pure mind- and I'm afraid I didn't possess that.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#81. A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so. And often others see you as you see yourself.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#82. Everyone breathes in air, but it's a wise person who knows when to use that air to speak and when to exhale in silence.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#83. By the time we're adults, our ideas have solidified. So I wanted to write for a younger audience, who would perhaps love heroes from other cultures.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#84. Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#85. A well-meaning man, Dhai Ma liked to say, is more dangerous because he believes in the rightness of what he does. Give me an honest rascal any day!
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#87. I started putting down my thoughts on paper out of loneliness while I was studying in America. I was very close to my grandfather, and when he died, I couldn't visit home. I started scribbling those thoughts.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#90. They say in the old tales that when a man and woman exchange looks the way we did, their spirits mingle. their gaze is a rope of gold binding each other. even if they never meet again, they carry a little of the other with them always. they can never forget, and they can never be wholly happy again
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#94. why man found himself driven to wrongdoing in spite of good intentions, Krishna replied, Because of anger and desire, our two direst enemies.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#95. Above us our palace waits, the only one I've ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming again like fireflies in a summer evening.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#97. Words are tricky. Sometimes you need them to bring out the hurt festering inside. If you don't, it turns gangrenous and kills you ... But sometimes words can break a feeling into pieces.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#98. I was caught on the freeway for hours when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The entire city had to be evacuated. I observed lives threatened by catastrophes and a whole range of behaviour. What could people do during a crisis?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#99. I write in my study, where I also have my prayer altar. I believe that keeps me focused and gives me positive energy and reminds me that I'm merely the instrument of greater creative forces.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#100. But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni