Top 160 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “If you want to stand up against wrongdoing, if you want to bring about change, do it in a way that doesn’t bruise a man’s pride. You’ll have a better chance of success.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

52. “Anything that makes us forget our true selves is a trap, princess – even something we love or define as beautiful.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

54. “You aren’t some weak-willed wench. You can control your emotions. Remember all that you’ve survived. Behave like the queen you are. No one can take your dignity away from you. You lose it only by your own actions.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

55. “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

56. “I couldn’t control what was done to me. But my response to it was in my control.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

57. “What is it in us that carves negative impressions so deeply into our brains?”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

58. “In life, it’s best not to take anything for free – unless it’s from someone who wishes you well.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

59. “When your heart is crusted over with your own pain, it is easy to feel little for others.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

60. “It’s hard to tell them apart, what we bring upon ourselves and what destiny determines. They’re as difficult to disentangle as love and sorrow.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

61. “For isn’t that what our homes are ultimately, our fantasies made corporeal, our secret selves exposed? The converse is also true: we grow to become that which we live within.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

62. “And remember this: whenever possible, don’t fight openly with your enemy. Let them think they’ve won – and then strike when least expected.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

64. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

65. “Even the wisest don’t know what’s hidden in the depths of their being.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

66. “And this is one of the final things I learn about love: it’s found in its purest form, on this imperfect earth, between mothers and young children, because there’s nothing they want except to make each other happy.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

67. “Isn’t that what truth is? The force of a person’s believing seeps into those around him – into the very earth and air and water – until there’s nothing else.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

68. “She laughed out loud. ‘I can’t teach you that,’ she said. ‘Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you’re lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you’ll spend your life yearning for a man you can’t have. I advise you to forget about love, princess. Pleasure is simpler, and duty more important. Learn to be satisfied with them.’ I should have believed her and modified my expectations. But I didn’t. Deep in my stubborn heart I was convinced I deserved more.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

69. “Distance is a great promoter of harmony:.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

70. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

71. “Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we’re fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

72. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

73. “But Krishna was a chameleon.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

74. “He never wasted time, Ram, especially on things he believed he couldn’t change.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

75. “I don’t agree with you that the private life must be sacrificed for the public one. And that is the final advice that I leave for my children: my dearest boys, balance duty with love. Trust me, it can be done.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

76. “It didn’t drain me as I thought it might. Instead, it invigorated me. Such was love’s magic – the giver gained more than the receiver.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

77. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

78. “But where love and sorrow bind people together, goodbyes are not so easily said. We were about to discover that.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

79. “Even if we love them with our entire being, even if we’re willing to commit the most heinous sin for their well-being. We must understand and respect the values that drive them. We must want what they want, not what we want for them.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

80. “Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

81. “Open yourself to the sight, and it will show you what you need to know. But never attempt to bend it to your will. Never pry into a particular life that has been brought to your care. That is to break trust.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

82. “How innocent we’d been, thinking that if only we willed something hard enough, it would come true.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

83. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

84. “All the way back, 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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

85. “The mark of a wise man is that he changes his mind when he sees mistake.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

86. “In the temple, I sit on the cool floor next to Grandfather, beneath the stern benevolence of the goddess’s glance. Grandfather is clad in only a traditional silk dhoti – no fancy modern clothes for him. That’s one of the things I admire about him, how he is always unapologetically, uncompromisingly himself. His spine is erect and impatient; white hairs blaze across his chest.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

87. “All of us groping in caverns, our fingertips raw against stone, searching for that slight crack, the edge of a door opening into love.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

88. “Motherhood taught me something new about love. It was the one relationship where you gave everything you had and then wished you had more to give.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

89. “Such rulers were adored by the citizens they protected, but often their families had to bear the brunt of sacrifice.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

90. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

91. “That’s how love stops us when it might be healthier to speak out, to not let frustration and rage build up until it explodes.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

92. “She taught me to close myself off from the sorrow of others so that I might survive.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

93. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

94. “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

95. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

97. “The herbs and chants weren’t working because of my anger towards Ram. In some dark part of my soul, I wanted him to suffer.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

98. “And have you come to set me free finally, Govinda?” he asked. “Have I paid sufficiently for my theft?”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

99. “Perhaps that was why I had to endure pain – because true transformation can only happen in the crucible of suffering. All impurities fall away from gold only when it’s heated to melting.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

100. “I don’t put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni