Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

Often, writer's block will occur when I don't understand a character or his/her motivations. So I will make notes analysing characters.

How can I forgive if you are not ready to give up that which caused you to stumble?

I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable
but I always was so, only I never knew it!

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.

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

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.

By the time we're adults, our ideas have solidified. So I wanted to write for a younger audience, who would perhaps love heroes from other cultures.

I listened mesmerized, visualizing the goddess with her divine mate, wondering if it was possible for humans to replicate this perfect relationship. Would I be blessed with such a love in my life?

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.

I've been interested in dreams myself for a long time, and it's a big part of the Indian tradition, especially where I was brought up in Calcutta in my family, which is quite traditional.

When your heart is crusted over with your own pain, it is easy to feel little for others.

The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you.

But maybe as I get older, I begin to see beauty where I least expected it before.

I was very fortunate that all my holidays I'd spend with my grandfather, experiencing a much more traditional way of life and listening to these wonderful stories, which I now feel are such an important part of Indian thinking.

I feel I can express the nuances of the Bengali lifestyle and ways of thinking better than other cultures.

Buddha's Wife tells a fascinating story, little known in the west, about the woman whom Buddha left behind. Gabriel Constans focuses the reader's attention on the strong and complicated women who surrounded Buddha and makes us re-think the nature of spiritual life.

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

Unlike novels with a hero or two heroines, in 'One Amazing Thing,' all the characters tell stories they've never told anyone before, so all the voices become equally important.

My grandfather was a very strong personality. He certainly ruled his household with an iron fist, even though it was often gloved in velvet!

I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.

They say in the old tales that when a man and woman exchange looks the way we did, their spirits mingle. their gaze is a rope of gold binding each other. even if they never meet again, they carry a little of the other with them always. they can never forget, and they can never be wholly happy again

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.'

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.

We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.'

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.

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.

Everyone breathes in air, but it's a wise person who knows when to use that air to speak and when to exhale in silence.

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.

Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved.

Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people ... Fennel ... smelling of changes to come.

The fates are cruel," Bheeshma whispered, "and they've been crueler than usual to you. But the sins you committed in ignorance are not your fault."

"I'll still have to pay for them," Karna said. "Isn't that how karma works? Look at what happened to Pandu, who killed a sage by accident, thinking him to be a wild deer. He had to bear the consequences of it for the rest of his life.

The power of a man is like a bull's charge, while the power of a woman moves aslant, like a serpent seeking its prey. Know the particular properties of your power. Unless you use it correctly, it won't get you what you want. His words perplexed me. Wasn't power singular and simple? In the world that I knew, men just happened to have more of it. (I hoped to change this.)

This is the nature of sorrow; often it fades with time, but once in a while it remains lodged below the surface of things, a stubborn thorn beneath a fingernail, making itself felt every time you brush against it. (How well I knew this, for random events would startle me into the memory of a pair of ancient eyes.)

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.

I find that it's really important for me to imagine characters and situations. That allows me a lot of freedom.

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

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

That's how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.

I grew up in Kolkata in a traditional family. We had friends who lived in mansions just like the one in 'Oleander Girl.' Growing up, I was fascinated by the old house and the old Bengal lifestyle.

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.

In life, it's best not to take anything for free - unless it's from someone who wishes you well.

This time I didn't launch into my usual tirade. Was it a memory of Krishna, the cool silence with which he countered disagreement, that stopped me? I saw something I hadn't realized before: words wasted energy.

I have a lot of respect and love for children's books.

It's very important to balance things; it's imperative to do something for the society, and women in particular, and help women who aren't in position to help themselves.

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

Even the wisest don't know what's hidden in the depths of their being

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

I came into Chicago in winter - I'd never been so cold in my life! I was very homesick, and a poor student at that time. America seemed so different and so filled with amazing things - and almost all of them were out of my reach.

'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.

When I was volunteering with Hurricane Katrina refugees in Houston in 2005, I first started thinking about the whole phenomenon of grace under pressure.

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

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.

I interviewed a lot of people in India, and I asked my mother to send me a lot of Bengali books on the tradition of dream interpretation. It's a real way for me to remember how people think about things in my culture.

As I lived on in America, I got to truly know the people of this country - so many kind and wonderful people, people of so many races - who helped me in so many ways. Who became my friends. I realized that underneath our different accents, habits, foods, religions, ways of thinking, we shared a common humanity.

I had friends who died in the 9/11 tragedy; some of my friends lost family members in the aftermath of Godhra.

I hate it when people throw away food - I've seen too many hungry people.

India lends itself well to fictionalization, but ultimately, it all depends on the writer's imagination.

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

Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible.

To achieve important things, we have to sacrifice what's important to us. That's an idea that's very central to Indian thinking.

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.

One of the things that I am learning is that each generation will have its own negotiations with identity. And one generation can not necessarily help the other generation with it.

Time is the great eraser, both of sorrow and of joy.

Two great and terrible truths of war are these: War is easy to enter into, but difficult to end. And ultimately, in war there are no winners.

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

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.

For men, the softer emotions are always intertwined with power and pride. That was why Karna waited for me to plead with him though he could have stopped my suffering with a single world. That was why he turned on me when I refused to ask for his pity. That was why he incited Dussasan to an action that was against the code of honor by which he lived his life. He knew he would regret it - in his fierce smile there had already been a glint of pain.

But was a woman's heart any purer, in the end?

That was the final truth I learned. All this time I'd thought myself better than my father, better than all those men who inflicted harm on a thousand innocents in order to punish the one man who had wronged them. I'd thought myself above the cravings that drove him. But I, too, was tainted with them, vengeance encoded into my blood. When the moment came I couldn't resist it, no more than a dog can resist chewing a bone that, splintering, makes his mouth bleed.

Already I was storing these lessons inside me. I would use them over the long years of exile to gain what I wanted, no matter what its price.

But Krishna, the slippery one, the one who had offered me a different solace, Krishna with his disappointed eyes - what was the lesson he'd tried to teach?

I came to the plain fields of Ohio with pictures painted by Hollywood movies and the works of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. None of them had much to say, if at all, about Dayton, Ohio.

I closed my eyes and willed my breath to slow, my conscious mind to fold itself inward. I could feel heat pulsing from my daughter's head, her frantic thoughts whirling like broken glass. I loosened my hold on my body and dropped into that whirlpool.

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,

Wisdom that isn't distilled in our own crucible can't help us.

Each person is distinct, separate. That ultimately we are each alone

May your heart be mine, may my heart be yours. May your sorrows be mine, may my joys be yours.

Immigration was a huge force in changing my outlook. I moved to America 30 years ago. I had to reassess my beliefs, especially about women's roles.

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.

Dissolving differences has always been an important motive for my writing, right from 'The Mistress of Spices.'

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.

Each desire in the world is different, as is each love.

I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.

Everytime i have turned the page he re-enters my life as awkward as postscript

Doesn't the imagination always exaggerate - or diminish - truth?

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

The bird began to carry them to a new life in a new land. We'll be happy ever after, the queen wanted to whisper to her daughter as they flew, but she knew that was not true. Life never is that way. And so instead she held her daughter in silence, heart to heart, and as they traveled each heart drew on the other's strength, so that when they reached their destination they would be ready.

In Western dream interpretation, it's often connected to psychotherapy and looking at the personality and what's going on in your life. In Eastern dream telling, many times there's this idea of a special gift. And without this gift, you could study and study, but you'd never really become an effective dream teller.

But Krishna was a chameleon.

I'm too careful with money - comes out of being poor for several years while growing up.

A kshatriya woman's highest purpose in life is to support the warriors in her life: her father, brother, husband and sons.

When you begin to weave your own desires into your vision, the true seeing is taken from you.

My first lesson on nature of love was that in a moment it could fulfill the cravings of a lifetime, like a light that someone might shine into a cavern that has been dark for a million years.

I want people to be sensitive about how women feel and think.

A well-meaning man, Dhai Ma liked to say, is more dangerous because he believes in the rightness of what he does. Give me an honest rascal any day!

Sometimes what is 'real' because it takes place in the physical world, like 9/11, is so unreal on the level of the soul. Then other things, which in terms of the physical world seem so magical and unbelievable, on the level of the soul seem very real.

I came from a traditional family, and it was an exciting but challenging transition to move to America and live on my own. The world around me was suddenly so different.

I wrote 'Mistress of Spices' at an unusual time when I had a near-death experience after the birth of my second son.

A book can be wonderful and powerful and accessible and artful all at the same time.

My favorite part was when my grandfather and I would make a special trip to Firpo's Bakery for red and green Christmas cookies and fruitcake studded with the sweetest cherries I've ever tasted. Usually Firpo's was too expensive for our slim budget, but Christmas mornings they gave a discount to any children who came in.

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

But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.

Pain makes us crazy. All we want is to throw the live coal of it as far from us as we can, not thinking what we might set afire.

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