Quotes from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

This incident taught me that the more love we distribute, the more it grows, coming back to us from unexpected sources. And its corollary: when we demand love, believing it to be our right, it shrivels, leaving only resentment behind.

Why are you attracted to self-sabotage? I

She taught me to close myself off from the sorrow of others so that I might survive

the confidence of the untested.

Who am I to say that small joys are less valuable than a passion which shatters your life?

In your yearning you have made me into that which I am not.

Who held his cries in until red swam behind his eyelids like bleeding stars.

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.

But where love and sorrow bind people together, goodbyes are not so easily said. We were about to discover that.

And remember this: whenever possible, don't fight openly with your enemy. Let them think they've won—and then strike when least expected.

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.

But when I see Sudha, her face bright with a simple, generous joy, the walls I'd set up so carefully collapse around me like a house of cards. Inside my heart it feels like a wet, new rain. In spite of all my insecurities, in spite of the oceans that'll be between us soon and the men that are between us already, I can never stop loving Sudha. It's my habit, and it's my fate.

People revered his father as the Lion of Punjab, but his mother is the one they should have called Lioness.

Some things can't be spoken. The body alone knows them. It holds them patiently, in its silent, intelligent cells, until you are ready to see.

O king of Ayodhya, you know I'm innocent, and yet, unfairly, you're asking me to step into the fire. You offer me a tempting prize indeed—to live in happiness with you and my children. But I must refuse. Because if I do what you demand, society will use my action forever after to judge other women. Even when they aren't guilty, the burden of proving their innocence will fall on them. And society will say

And have you come to set me free finally, Govinda?" he asked. "Have I paid sufficiently for my theft?

That's how love stops us when it might be healthier to speak out, to not let frustration and rage build up until it explodes.

The herbs and chants weren't working because of my anger towards Ram. In some dark part of my soul, I wanted him to suffer.

To upset the delicate axis of giving and receiving on which our lives are held precarious.

niente vale quanto essere il padrone di te stesso.

Ah, how helpless we children are, how dependent on the whims of adults.

Rage rises up in me until my whole body is scorched, for some kinds of burning don't require a fire. Not a word of love, not a word of apology for the sorrow he has caused me. Not a word about the unjust and cruel way in which he sent me away. He hasn't even called me by my name.

And the mother, who through all the years of her hardship had never shed a tear, wept at his trust and her deception.

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.