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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 81169e4 | He told me that visions of all he needed to write came to him at the oddest moments, forcing him to abandon other activities and write them down. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 7581d7b | A foot of jade is of no value, an inch of time is to be prized. | Andre Norton | ||
| cc3167a | To return to the peaceful forest, its healing green canopies. To return to the ashram community, where everyone trusts and accepts me, | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| d87a8c1 | Rage rises up in me until my whole body is scorched, for some kinds of burning don't require a fire. Not a word of love, not a word of apology for the sorrow he has caused me. Not a word about the unjust and cruel way in which he sent me away. He hasn't even called me by my name. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 4fc837c | Anger and self-pity are useless emotions, so I push them away and speak calmly, even though my heart is breaking all over again. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 622688e | did you think of the impact your actions would have on the women of the city? That men would punish their wives harshly or even discard them for the smallest refractions, saying King Ram did so. Then why shouldn't I? | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| bc75c91 | sometimes one has to drop logic and go with the instinct of the heart, even if it contradicts law. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| fa55caf | 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. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 87a5da4 | What enchantment did my betrothed possess that made even enemies forget their ancient rivalries in their desire to make him happy? | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 34c7092 | He'd probably kill us both with the same blow. A little part of my mind said, That's all right. It would be better than living on alone if he killed Ram. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 750f1d6 | be polite and respectful to all and don't take sides. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 96a19b5 | fashion wasn't as important to me as to Urmila. There would be time enough to wear my mother's saris. And in any case Ram's eyes were on me all the time, too. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| dae0710 | Ram wasn't shy about telling me what pleased him, and he asked me what I liked until I overcame my shyness and answered. Bedtime became at once exciting and joyful, a secret gift I looked forward to all day while we went about our separate duties--his as heir-apparent, mine as new bride. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| c3b8165 | How, without detaching ourselves from the spell of the past, can we focus fully on the moment that faces us? | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 186f192 | Haven't you seen how many of them come to the palace each week, just to see us wave to them from the public balcony? | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 66a5531 | There's always a connection, a reason because of which people enter your orbit, bristling with dark energy like a meteor intent on collision. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| a15fd24 | It's hard to tell them apart, what we bring upon ourselves and what destiny determines. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 04839c8 | Each word she'd set down in the journals was a gift and a wound. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| b5f92c3 | A wind rose around me, from where I didn't know. It was unexpectedly cold and made me shiver. 'Sacrifice, sacrifice', whispered the trees, carrying my promise across the valley | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 0e45dac | Instead of consoling us, my mother spoke sternly. 'Pull yourselves together. Surely I've brought you up better than this? we come into the world alone, and we leave it alone. And in between, too, if it is destined, we'll be alone. Draw on your inner strength. Remember, you can be your own worst enemy - or your best friend. It's up to you. And also this: what you can't change, you must endure.' I knew it was mostly to me that she'd spoken. '.. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| c199f26 | I forgave you a long time ago,' I say to Ram. 'Though I didn't know it until now. Because this is the most important aspect of love, whose other face is compassion: It isn't doled out, drop by drop. It doesn't measure who is worthy and who isn't. It is like the ocean. Unfathomable. Astonishing. Measureless. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| b087976 | And that is why, O King Ram, I must reject your kind offer to allow me to prove my innocence again. Because this is one of those times when a woman must stand up and say, No more! | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 18783c9 | Around me celestial flowers are falling in a crystal shower. Or are they the tears of the gods who crowd the skies, looking down in sorrow and admiration at my final act of self-respect? | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| bdbed29 | 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. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 9a7698e | Once I said to my mother, As long as there's fresh bread in this world, things can't be beyond repair. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 6a83190 | It is unfair that one person should suffer in order for others to be blessed. If the gods were powerful enough to shape our destinies, why couldn't they just send us a good fortune untainted by sorrow? | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 90371fb | Write our story, too. For always we've been pushed into corners, trivialized, misunderstood, blamed, forgotten--or maligned and used as cautionary tales. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 5dce34e | Love was full of contradictions. Sometimes the person you loved weakened you and sometimes he or she made you a stronger person. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 0133f0e | They were exiles, but Hob provided a type of protection once they settled in. By playing up their strangeness, the way a slave simpered and acted childlike to escape a beating, they evaded the entanglements of the quarter. The walls of Hob made a fortress some nights, rescuing them from the feuds and conspiracies. White men eat you up, but sometimes colored folk eat you up, too. She | Colson Whitehead | ||
| e042ffa | 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. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 66caffa | What is more numerous than the grass? The thoughts that rise in the mind of man. Who is truly wealthy? That man to whom the agreeable and disagreeable, wealth and woe, past and future, are the same. What is the most wondrous thing on earth? Each day countless humans enter the Temple of Death, yet the ones left behind continue to live as though they were immortal. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 6fb47e8 | 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. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| df742ef | So this, too, was true of love: it could make us forget our own needs. It could make us strong even when the world was collapsing around us. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 44a5eeb | I pondered the word endure, what it meant. It didn't mean giving in. It didn't mean being weak or accepting injustice. It meant taking the challenges thrown at us and dealing with them as intelligently as we knew until we grew stronger than them. That was what I'd work on. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 580b8fb | I saw that this was how we would live out the next decades, dragging ourselves from one expected action to the next, hoping by meticulous duty to bring each other some small measure of happiness. But the comfort that duty offers is lukewarm at best. Happiness, like a mischievous bird that hops from branch to branch, would continue to elude us. | happiness | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| 2350a91 | This was my first lesson on the nature of love: that in a moment it could fulfil the cravings of a lifetime, like a light that someone might shine into a cavern that has been dark for a million years. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 07a77f0 | 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.) | sorrow | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| c3a2efe | But some things can't be told that way, I know that now. They can only be approached stealthily, from behind, like wild birds. And even then they catch your scent and take flight before you throw your net of words over them. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 4a26214 | Watching them, I feel at once happy and lonely. It's not the loneliness of being without a mate, but something more primal. As though I were the only being left on this side of the glass, while the rest of the world--happy, uncaring--lived out its life on the other side. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| c97e20b | of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the | Colson Whitehead | ||
| b261e6e | What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway? | prison runaway slavery status | Colson Whitehead | |
| 573d1ac | themselves that separated the human spirits within | Colson Whitehead | ||
| c0c9407 | Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire. | kate atkinson | ||
| 41643e8 | the shadow of the master, the reminder that | Colson Whitehead |