Top 100 Chitra Quotes
#1. This is what award-winning author and international journalist TIMERI MURARI had to say:
Dear Anant
I managed to read 'Skewed Fantasy' a charming story on Chitra and her problems with NRIs and her dreams.
Best wishes
Timeri
Anant Acharya
#3. 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
#5. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. I saw something I hadn't realized before: words wasted energy. I would use my strength instead to nurture my belief that my life would unfurl uniquely.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#14. I'm a very senses-oriented person, and I want to bring readers in on the level of the senses, so they can experience another culture and another place.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#17. I realise that a novel and a film are different mediums. As artistes, we need to respect other artistes. It also needs a lot of courage to take risks to experiment and interpret known literary works.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#18. 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
#19. After 9/11, there was so much distress in America that it led to an inter-cultural breakdown. Some of our communities were targeted. Many of our adults shut themselves off from other cultures. I tried to bring children of Indian and other cultures together in my literature.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#20. The Mahabharata might have been a great and heroic battle, but there are no winners. The losers, of course, lose.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#21. Can our actions change our destiny? Or are they like sand piled against the breakage in a dam, merely delaying the inevitable?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#22. It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#26. 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
#27. 'The Moonstone' was all I could have hoped for. A mysterious, cursed jewel, wrested from India, only to be stolen later from a great British mansion. Enigmatic, dangerous priests who follow it across the ocean in hopes of wresting it back.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#28. 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
#29. My grandfather was a very strong personality. He certainly ruled his household with an iron fist, even though it was often gloved in velvet!
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#33. I have been watching how Indian women are forced to do certain things, as the stories of sacrifice and devotion in mythology demand from them. And then there are inspiring stories about women like the Rani of Jhansi that offer women refreshing role models.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#35. Strong women, when respected, make the whole society stronger. One must be careful with such rapid changes, though, and make an effort to preserve, at the same time, the positive traditions of Indian culture.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#36. Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people ... Fennel ... smelling of changes to come.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#38. 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
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. To achieve important things, we have to sacrifice what's important to us. That's an idea that's very central to Indian thinking.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#44. 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. 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
#48. 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
#51. 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
#52. She had always been this way: interested-quite unnecessarily, some would say-in the secrets of strangers. When flying, she always chose a window seat so that when the plane took off or landed, she could look down on the tiny houses and imagine the lives of the people who inhabited them.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#53. Dissolving differences has always been an important motive for my writing, right from 'The Mistress of Spices.'
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#54. She did understand about sacrificing values for the sake of love. It was a lesson all mothers had to memorize.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#55. The darkness is a cresting wave. It sweeps me up out of my body until I float among the stars, those tine bright pores on the sky's skin. If only I could pass through them, I would end up on the other side, the right side, shadowless, perfectly illuminated, beyond the worries of this mundane world
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#57. I liked his voice, rich and unself-conscious even when he forgot words and hummed to fill in the gap. What I didn't understand, I imagined, and thus it became a love song.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#58. I find that it's really important for me to imagine characters and situations. That allows me a lot of freedom.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#59. I think writers from both East and West have long been fascinated by the ancient tales and the opportunity to reinterpret them.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#60. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. The ancient world is always accessible, no matter what culture you come from. I remember when I was growing up in India and I read the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.'
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#66. Everyone has a story. I don't believer anyone can go through life without encountering at least one amazing thing.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Can't you ever be serious?' I said, mortified.
'It's difficult,' he said. 'There's so little in life that's worth it.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#73. Just as we cast off worn clothes and wear new ones, when the time arrives, the soul casts off the body and finds a new one to work out its karma. Therefore the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#74. 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
#75. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. As I've written more, and as other Indian American voices have grown around me, I strive harder to find experiences that are unique yet a meaningful and resonant part of the American story.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#82. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#88. Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#89. Ii would no longer waste time on regret. I would turn my face to the future and carve it into the shape I wanted. - Panchali
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#90. 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
#95. It takes us away from the world of strangers
To a new world of laughter
With time the whirled churning deep inside
And why does the smile fades, as age passes?
Dr. Chitra Navada
#96. Isn't that what truth is? The force of a person's believing seeps into those around him - into the very earth and air and water - until there's nothing else.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#97. 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
#98. 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
#100. India lends itself well to fictionalization, but ultimately, it all depends on the writer's imagination.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
