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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 385194f | We are the keepers of the heart's dusty corners. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| b647cc4 | The grandfather dropped his weapons and knelt before him. On his face was a look I could only interpret as hope. "And have you come to set me free finally, Govinda?" he asked." | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| db69533 | She put on some music. Drum and flute, I think. She played it soft, because it was dreadfully late, a time when all good men and women, or at least the practical ones, had gone to bed. Then she danced for me. | fiction immigrant-experience india indian-authors mothers-and-daughters womens-fiction | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| 17e5eaa | Sarojini admits he has a point; girls have to be toughened so they can survive a world that presses harder on women, and surely Bimal does a good job of that. But deep in a hidden place inside her that is stubborn as a mudfish, Sarojini knows she is right, too. Being loved a little more than necessary arms a girl in a different way. | love | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| 195d3ba | She did understand about sacrificing values for the sake of love. It was a lesson all mothers had to memorize. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| e123882 | 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. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 19aaaa4 | 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. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| d6f6886 | No, Ashok. Love is not a tap. It flows and flows like blood from a wound, and you can die of it. | love metaphoric | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| f3d99dc | 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. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 85dd0ba | What is it in us that carves negative impressions so deeply into our brains? | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 86ad967 | It felt as though someone had reached into him and was wresting out his heart. In later life his sorrows would be deep-drawn and bone-aching sad, but never like this. Perhaps only the young can feel such exquisitely intense pain. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 02b8fa2 | I long to stretch out on the sofa, wrapping myself in the red quilt that's lying there. Then, with a stab, I recognize the quilt. My father had brought it back from a business trip he took to New England long ago. Ironic, how objects remain in your life long after people have exited. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| d35fc91 | So many photos, so carefully preserved. How absurdly central I'd been to my mother's life. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 63b7e35 | After that, somehow, I began fixing things in my life. Dr Berger says being close to death will do that, but I'm not sure catalysts of change can be so easily identified. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 2633ea1 | I guess that's when people call their mothers - when their world is falling apart. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 13f4130 | Pain, which is ultimately only like itself. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| cf39f09 | til which fried in its own oil restores lustre when one has lost interest in life. I will be Tilottama, the essence of til, life-giver, restorer of health and hope. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 47dbb0e | 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. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| a0dbe99 | He who binds to himself a Joy Doth the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the Joy as it flies Lives in Eternity's sunrise. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| b4af8b6 | We had known it would be hard to leave this island of women where on our skin the warm rain fell like pomegranate seeds, where we woke to birdcall and slept to the First Mother's singing, where we swam naked without shame in lakes of blue lotus. To exchange it for the human world whose harshness we remembered. But this? | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 89eeca9 | Now that she no longer cares whether tears blotch her letter, she feels no need to weep. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 17dcf34 | Is the desire for vengeance stronger than the longing to be loved? What evil magic does it possess to draw the human heart so powerfully to it? | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| e17e081 | Bushes would pull in their sharp thorns and burst into flower when I watered them or loosened the earth around their roots. Squirrel-like creatures, their long white hair smooth as silk-thread, would scurry up to take berries from my palm. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 5aaa8c4 | 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. | divakaruni immigrant-experience india indian-american indian-fiction mothers-and-daughters novel | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| acf02dc | Would you like to come in?" I said. My hands were sweaty. Inside my chest an ocean heaved and crashed and heaved again. "I would," he said. I saw his Adam's apple jerk as he swallowed. "Thank you." I was distracted by that thank you. We had moved past the language of formality long ago. It was strange to relearn it with each other." | divakaruni fiction immigrant-experience immigrant-fiction indian indian-authors love-mothers-and-daughters mothers-and-daughters novel women-s-fiction | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| e248de0 | Ah, how helpless we children are, how dependent on the whims of adults. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 11ac25d | And if I wasn't able to bar anger, or her insidious cousin, irritation, From my heart, at least some of the time I bit back the sharp comments that I had prided myself on dispensing so freely all these years. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 07bdb14 | A situation in itself," he said, "is neither happy nor unhappy. It's only your response to it that causes your sorrow. But" | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 358cc23 | 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. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 8fa6c26 | 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 | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| bf0a765 | Good daughters are fortunate lamps, brightening the family's name. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 8809b58 | Weeping is not bad. It clears out the heart, making space in it for growth. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 3b14dc5 | Early in my life, I learned to eavesdrop. I was driven to this ignoble practice because people seldom told me anything worth knowing. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 3e5f002 | 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. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 2eca067 | She taught me to close myself off from the sorrow of others so that I might survive | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| ec94061 | the confidence of the untested. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 04fe0d3 | Such rulers were adored by the citizens they protected, but often their families had to bear the brunt of sacrifice. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 78cdfdb | mother?" Yudhisthir asked. "Haven't our scriptures" | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 17c9c59 | Dear Anju, for whom love means that we must want the same thing, always. That we must be the same. She has not yet learned that ultimately each person - even Anjali and Basudha - is distinct, separate. That ultimately we are each alone. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 156e0af | It's a rare man--and an even rarer ruler--that can remain untouched by jealousy in the face of a peer's sudden prosperity. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 76e4b08 | The force of a person's believing seeps into those around him-- into the very earth and air and water--until there's nothing else. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 2631916 | Endure your challenges. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 397b680 | Mostly their troubles were minor ones, for they followed a healthy lifestyle, waking at sunrise to bathe in the river, then spending long hours in study or prayer, followed by daily chores, simple meals, storytelling | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 4ed59b3 | I was forced to face the truth. Ram no longer cared for me. Or if he did, it was pushed deep down inside him, suffocated by kingship. And since the children came from my body and were subject to the same gossip and doubts, he couldn't afford to care for them either. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni |