Top 160 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

3. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

4. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

5. “Tomorrow is another day. I’ve got plenty of things to worry about right now.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

6. “Each day has a color, a smell.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

7. “Your childhood hunger is the one that never leaves you.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

8. “I may be injured; I may even be wounded to the heart; but I’m not defeated yet.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

10. “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

11. “Often, others see you, as you see yourself.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

12. “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

13. “To see a loved one in pain is more wrenching than to bear that pain yourself.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

14. “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

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

16. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

18. “Wisdom that isn’t distilled in our own crucible can’t help us.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

19. “I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable – but I always was so, only I never knew it!”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

20. “Can our actions change our destiny? Or are they like sand piled against the breakage in a dam, merely delaying the inevitable?”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

21. “Love. There’s no argument, no matter how strong, that can overcome that word.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

22. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

23. “Just as we cast off worn clothes and wear new ones, when the time arrives, the soul casts off the body and finds a new one to work out its karma. Therefore the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

24. “Like many Indian children, I grew up on the vast, varied, and fascinating tales of the Mahabharat.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

25. “Fenugreek, Tuesday’s spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

26. “Your childhood hunger is the one that never leaves you. No matter how famous or powerful they became, my husbands would always long to be cherished. They would always yearn to feel worthy. If a person could make them feel that way, they’d bind themselves to him – or her – forever.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

27. “But truth, when it’s being lived, is less glamorous than our imaginings.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

28. “Doesn’t the imagination always exaggerate – or diminish – truth?”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

29. “A well-meaning man, Dhai Ma liked to say, is more dangerous because he believes in the rightness of what he does. Give me an honest rascal any day!”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

30. “Everytime i have turned the page he re-enters my life as awkward as postscript.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

31. “Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as reality, an objective and untouched nature of being. Or if all that we encounter has already been changed by what we had imagined it to be. If we have dreamed it into being.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

32. “She who sows vengeance must reap its bloody fruit.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

33. “I have to believe in possibility. How else can we bear the enormous weight of life?”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

34. “Perhaps that was why I had to endure pain – because true transformation can only happen in the crucible of suffering.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

35. “Ii would no longer waste time on regret. I would turn my face to the future and carve it into the shape I wanted. – Panchali.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

36. “I guess there’s a lot we hope for that never happens.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

37. “This incident taught me that the more love we distribute, the more it grows, coming back to us from unexpected sources. And its corollary: when we demand love, believing it to be our right, it shrivels, leaving only resentment behind.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

38. “Some things can’t be spoken. The body alone knows them. It holds them patiently, in its silent, intelligent cells, until you are ready to see.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

39. “A situation in itself,” he said, “is neither happy nor unhappy. It’s only your response to it that causes your sorrow.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

40. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

41. “I am turmeric who rose out of the ocean of milk when the devas and asuras churned for the treasures of the universe. I am turmeric who came after the nectar and before the poison and thus lie in between.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

42. “Loving someone so deeply was dangerous. It made you too vulnerable.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

43. “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

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

45. “I thought that if lokas existed at all, good women would surely go to one where men were not allowed so that they could be finally free of male demands.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

47. “Just as you’ve deceived me, so will your mind deceive you. When you need the Brahmastra the most, you’ll forget the mantra needed to call it up.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

48. “I broke the first rule, the unwritten one, meant not just for warriors but all of us: I took love and used it as a balm to soothe my ego.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

49. “But when I see Sudha, her face bright with a simple, generous joy, the walls I’d set up so carefully collapse around me like a house of cards. Inside my heart it feels like a wet, new rain. In spite of all my insecurities, in spite of the oceans that’ll be between us soon and the men that are between us already, I can never stop loving Sudha. It’s my habit, and it’s my fate.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

50. “Every person has a heart, but we’re not always lucky enough to get a glimpse of it. And every heart, even the hardest, has a fragile spot. If you hit it there, it shatters.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni