Quotes from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Girls have to be toughened so they can survive a world that presses harder on women.

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.

Every person has a heart, but we're not always lucky enough to get a glimpse of it. And every heart, even the hardest, has a fragile spot. If you hit it there, it shatters.

Your childhood hunger is the one that never leaves you. No matter how famous or powerful they became, my husbands would always long to be cherished. They would always yearn to feel worthy. If a person could make them feel that way, they'd bind themselves to him—or her—forever.

Knowing yet not knowing is a strange sensation, like being split in two

Rakhi likes the comfortable clutter of her life, the things she loves gathered around her like a shawl against the winterliness of the world.

She did understand about sacrificing values for the sake of love. It was a lesson all mothers had to memorize.

For isn't that what our homes are ultimately, our fantasies made corporeal, our secret selves exposed? The converse is also true: we grow to become that which we live within.

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.

The wind blows through him, cleansing. Salt and distance, smell of the deep.

You will be remembered for causing the greatest war of your time.

his love was totally different from every other love in my life. Unlike them, it didn't expect me to behave in a certain way. It didn't change into displeasure or anger or even hatred if I didn't comply. It healed me.

In the things we love lie clues to who we are. What we want for those we love.

Perhaps that was why I had to endure pain—because true transformation can only happen in the crucible of suffering

How many mysteries are locked within the people we think we know.

This is what Kaikeyi failed to see: it's not enough to merely love someone. Even if we love them with our entire being, even if we're willing to commit the most heinous sin for their well-being. We must understand and respect the values that drive them. We must want what they want, not what we want for them.

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. And: When a man reaches a state where honor and dishonor are alike to him, then he is considered supreme. Strive to gain such a state.

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.

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

To see a loved one in pain is more wrenching than to bear that pain yourself.

She lifts her eyes, and there is Death in the corner, but not like a king with his iron crown, as the epics claimed. Why, it is a giant brush loaded with white paint. It descends upon her with gentle suddenness, obliterating the shape of the world.

Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more.

Good daughters are fortunate lamps, brightening the family's name. Wicked daughters are firebrands, blackening the family's fame.

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.