Quotes from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The dream is a mirror showing me my beauty. I bless the dream. The dream is a mirror showing me my ugliness. I bless the dream.

Vaishnava jana to tene kahiyeje pi?a paraay? jaa?e re. Only those who feel the pain of others may be called truly good. Sarojini sees her listening and says, "A doctor is like that, no?

I think I was most envious of him then. He had been in the presence of a great and blissful mystery. He had glimpsed the truth of existence that extended beyond this oscillating world of pleasure and sorrow. I lay awake all night, my soul hungering to know what he had known.

Once I said to my mother, As long as there's fresh bread in this world, things can't be beyond repair.

Weeping is not bad. It clears out the heart, making space in it for growth.

You are a daughter of independence, the country's future. Women like you are the ones for whom we fought and died, the ones who will transform India. You must carry the flag forward. You may fall from time to time. We all did. What is important is to get up again.

Early in my life, I learned to eavesdrop. I was driven to this ignoble practice because people seldom told me anything worth knowing.

We are the keepers of the heart's dusty corners.

Write our story, too. For always we've been pushed into corners, trivialized, misunderstood, blamed, forgotten—or maligned and used as cautionary tales.

Behold, we give you this girl, a gift beyond what you asked for. Take good care of her, for she will change the course of history.

For the first time I admit I am giving myself to love. Not the worship I offered the Old One, not the awe I felt for the spices. But human love, all tangled up, at once giving and demanding and pouting and ardent. It frightens me, the risk of it. And I see that the risk lies not in what I always feared, the anger of the spices, their desertion. The true risk is that I will somehow lose this love.

Left alone to die on a frozen hill! I, whose life had been a rush of attending to the needs of my five husbands—how ironic that at the moment of my own final need not one of them should be with me!

sometimes one has to drop logic and go with the instinct of the heart, even if it contradicts law.

Ram and Lakshman had joined their father, who had been housed in a separate palace, at the edge of the royal grounds because it was considered inauspicious for brides and grooms to meet in the days that preceded the wedding. I had to console myself with the fact that in a few days we'd belong to each other. We'd spend the rest of our lives together, and we wouldn't allow any of society's foolish dictates to separate us.

A volte mi chiedo se la realtà esiste davvero, se c'è varamente una natura delle cose, obiettiva e intatta. O se tutto ciò che ci accade è già modificato in anticipo dalla nostra immaginazione. Se sognando qualcosa gli diamo vita.

A line from a movie she once saw flits through her mind: Life gets in the way of art.

A line from a movie she once saw flits through her mind: Life gets in the way of art. That pretty much sums up my existence, she thinks.

Not even Duryodhan had dared to look at me quite like this in his sabha, for he'd known I was a queen. Is this how men looked at ordinary women, then? Women they considered their inferiors? A new sympathy for my maids rose in my mind. When I became queen again, I thought, I would make sure common women were treated differently.

Animals were superior to most humans. Men would have turned away once you had nothing more to give them.

She feels a certain pity when she thinks of that time, that self. Such an earnest wife-self, wanting so much, her stance one of perpetual leaning forward, as though perfection was a town just a little farther down the road. She didn't know then that perfection had nothing to do with happiness.

The dream comes heralding joy. I welcome the dream. The dream comes heralding sorrow. I welcome the dream. The dream is a mirror showing me my beauty. I bless the dream. The dream is a mirror showing me my ugliness. I bless the dream. My life is nothing but a dream From which I will wake into death, which is nothing but a dream of life.

Their voices were excited and self-assured and conspiratorial, the way they used to be in India, when they were political leaders. As she watched them it struck her that America might have saved their lives, but it had also diminished them.

So many photos, so carefully preserved. How absurdly central I'd been to my mother's life.

Drupad was mystified. He'd had little to do with the Kaurava clan, whose kingdom lay to the northwest, in Hastinapur. From what he'd heard, their blind ruler, Dhritarashtra, was a quiet, careful man.