Quotes from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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.

did you think of the impact your actions would have on the women of the city? That men would punish their wives harshly or even discard them for the smallest refractions, saying King Ram did so. Then why shouldn't I?

My heart is filled with passion for the spices, my ears with the music of our dance together. My blood with our shared power. I need no pitiful mortal man to love. I believe this. Wholly.

And that is why, O King Ram, I must reject your kind offer to allow me to prove my innocence again. Because this is one of those times when a woman must stand up and say, No more!

Where women are honored, there the gods are pleased.) —Manusmriti 3/56, 100 CE

How entangled love is with expectation, that poison vine! The stronger the expectation, the more our anger towards the beloved if he doesn't fulfil it—and the less our control over ourselves.

days slow as cattle grazing in a parched summer field.

On the day the palace was done, Maya took Arjun aside. "You save Maya life," he said, "so I give you warning. Live in palace. Enjoy. But not invite anyone to come see.

O the irony of desire, always hearkening after the liquid glimmer beyond the distant-most dune. Sometimes only to find that it is no different from the parched sand on which we stood days, months, years ago, in yearning.

You are thinking, what does it look like, such a knife. Most ordinary, for that is the nature of deepest magic. Deepest magic which lies at the heart of our everyday lives, flickering fire, if only we had eyes to see.

The life that you're living today is only a bubble in the cosmic stream, shaped by the karma of other lifetimes. The one who is your husband in this birth was perhaps your enemy in the last, and he whom you may hate, may have been your beloved. Why weep for any of them, then?

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.

Even the most startling adventure, sooner or later, must become routine.

Most of all we learned to feel without words the sorrows of our sisters, and without words to console them. In this way our lives were not so different from those of the girls we had left behind in our home villages

people look down on a woman without education. She has few options. To survive, she is forced to put up with ill-treatment. She must depend on the kindness of strangers, an unsure thing. I do not want that for you

Things are breaking down inside of her. She waits to see if she can build new, satisfying shapes from them.

It wasn't that I was afraid of death. How could I be? I knew nothing of it. Still, I didn't want to die. Not without seeing Ram one more time. That's how the bonds of love tie us down.

now I sometimes wonder if it might not have been the most worthwhile of the skills I learned on the island.

Sometimes he sang to me, making me smile because he was always slightly off-key, my husband who was so perfect at everything else. For me, that was part of his charm.

Wait!' I cried, asking him the question that had bothered me for a long time. 'Did you ever love Ahalya? Were you sorry that you'd ruined her life?' Indra disappeared without answering, which didn't surprise me. The gods are slippery beings.

I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so swift and bright that no man could snare them.

When Arjun asked why man found himself driven to wrongdoing in spite of good intentions, Krishna replied, Because of anger and desire, our two direst enemies. How

Good daughters are fortunate lamps, brightening the family's name.

Tilo my daughter," said the Old One, and by her face I knew she felt my struggle in her own heart, "most gifted most troublesome most loved, Tilo traveling to America eager as an arrow, I have here something for you." And from the folds of her clothing she removed it and placed it on my tongue, a slice of gingerroot, wild island ada to give my heart steadfastness, to keep me strong in my vows.