Top 129 Quotes & Sayings by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - Page 2

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

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.

I show women growing, changing, becoming stronger in many kinds of situations.

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.

I am a Hindu, brought up mostly in India.

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.'

It is an Englishman who turns out to be the real villain of 'The Moonstone.' By contrast, the three Indian priests who dedicate their lives to returning the jewel to its proper home in the temple, though they have nothing personal to gain by doing so, are positively heroic.

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.

The ancient world is always accessible, no matter what culture you come from. I remember when I was growing up in India and I read the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.'

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.

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

I want my books to force readers to recognise the fact that a woman is a human being just like them.

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.

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.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

I was about 12 when I first encountered 'The Moonstone' - or a Classics Illustrated version of it - digging through an old trunk in my grandfather's house on a rainy Bengali afternoon.

India has been a very accepting culture. We pride ourselves on that. That is a global truth. In fact, it forms a major theme in my books.

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.

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

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

In community work, you reach some people, but in writing, I can reach many more people, not only in exploring issues of domestic violence, but also by showing the importance of strong women in communities.

There is no conflict in looking good. You buy things you need, and then you do something good for society.

With the strong women I write about, I want to create a sense of strong possibilities.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Looking back, I could not point to one special time and say, There! That's what is amazing. We can change completely and not recognize it. We think terrible events have made us into stone. But love slips in like a chisel - and suddenly it is an ax, breaking us into pieces from the inside.

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

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

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

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.

...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.

After the fire, when I'd tried to express my gratitude for their kindness to our customers, they'd been awkward, uncomfortable. My father had had to explain to me that giving thanks is not a common practice in India. 'Then how do you know if people appreciated what you did?' I'd asked. 'Do you really need to know?' my father had asked back.

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

I guess there's a lot we hope for that never happens.

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

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.

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.

Because ultimately only the witness -- and not the actors -- knows the truth (Vyasa to Draupadi)

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

Fenugreek, Tuesday's spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain.

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

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

Each day has a color, a smell.

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.

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

Tomorrow is another day. I've got plenty of things to worry about right now.

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

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.