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.

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

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.

Each day has a color, a smell.

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

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

...don't create snakes out of ropes. You have enough to worry about.

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

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

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

Often, others see you, as you see yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your childhood hunger is the one that never leaves you.

Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

In the white marble hall of the hotel, I'm waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we're dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent.

She lifts a bowl of kheer and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.

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

Push away the past, that vessel in which all emotions curdle to regret.

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

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.

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.

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.

But Krishna was a chameleon.

No, Ashok. Love is not a tap. It flows and flows like blood from a wound, and you can die of it.

Danger will come upon us when it will. We can't stop it. We can only try to be prepared. There's no point in looking ahead to that danger and suffering its effects even before it comes to us.

It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.

Truth, like diamond, has many facets.

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.

As I remember my grandfather and those Christmas mornings he gave for a little girl's pleasure, I know that often a big life starts with doing small things.