Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

...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.

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

Each day has a color, a smell.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Buddha's Wife tells a fascinating story, little known in the west, about the woman whom Buddha left behind. Gabriel Constans focuses the reader's attention on the strong and complicated women who surrounded Buddha and makes us re-think the nature of spiritual life.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I walk out of the room, lurching under the weight of the lesson I've learned less than one hour into wifehood: How quickly the sweetest love turns rancid when it isn't returned. When the one you love loves someone else.

Often, others see you, as you see yourself

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.

I tried to hold on to this compassion, sensing its preciousness, but even as I reached to grasp it, it dissipated into wisps. No revelation can endure unless it is bolstered by a calm pure mind- and I'm afraid I didn't possess that.

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