Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

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.

A dream is a telegram from the hidden world...Only a fool or an illiterate person ignores it.

Words are tricky. Sometimes you need them to bring out the hurt festering inside. If you don't, it turns gangrenous and kills you. . . . But sometimes words can break a feeling into pieces.

Each day has a color, a smell.

Expectations are like hidden rocks in your path , All they do is trip you up

The heart itself is beyond control. That is its power, and its weakness.

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

There was an unexpected freedom in finding out that one wasn't as important as one had always assumed!

Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.

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

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.

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

Everyone has a story. I don't believer anyone can go through life without encountering at least one amazing thing.

Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you'll spend your life yearning for a man you can't have.

Or is this how humans survive, shrugging off history, immersing themselves in the moment?

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

Above us our palace waits, the only one I've ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming again like fireflies in a summer evening.

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

Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople 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.

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 moved here when I was 20 to go to college. After I moved here, I became much more aware of the importance of the culture and literature to my life. Sometimes when you're immersed in something, you just don't notice it very much. Moving away makes you appreciate your culture. Living here, I've thought more and more about India, and what being Indian-American means to me. And it's made me incorporate things from Indian literature into my own writing.

A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so. And often others see you as you see yourself.

Can't you ever be serious?' I said, mortified. 'It's difficult,' he said. 'There's so little in life that's worth it.

Monday is the day of silence, day of the whole white mung bean, which is sacred to the moon.

Sometimes -- she knows this from her own life -- to get to the other side, you must travel through grief. No detours are possible.