Top 160 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I heard the laments of the people of Hastinapur, their sorrow at losing us. But I no longer required their tears. It baffled me that as a younger women I’d thought that such a thing would make me happy.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

102. “When you begin to weave your own desires into your vision, the true seeing is taken from you.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

103. “It’s a rare man – and an even rarer ruler – that can remain untouched by jealousy in the face of a peer’s sudden prosperity.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

104. “My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It’s been decades since our bodies have been this close. It’s an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

105. “Hope not built on reason brings disappointment only.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

106. “Good daughters are fortunate lamps, brightening the family’s name. Wicked daughters are firebrands, blackening the family’s fame.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

107. “In the things we love lie clues to who we are. What we want for those we love.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

108. “You did what you were supposed to. Played your part perfectly.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

109. “You will be remembered for causing the greatest war of your time.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

110. “The pleasures that arise from sense-objects are bound to end, and thus they are only sources of pain. Don’t get attached to them. And: When a man reaches a state where honor and dishonor are alike to him, then he is considered supreme. Strive to gain such a state.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

111. “Who am I to say that small joys are less valuable than a passion which shatters your life?”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

112. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

113. “She lifts her eyes, and there is Death in the corner, but not like a king with his iron crown, as the epics claimed. Why, it is a giant brush loaded with white paint. It descends upon her with gentle suddenness, obliterating the shape of the world.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

114. “O exhilaration, I thought. To be lifted up through the eye of chaos, to balance breath-stopped on the edge of nothing. And the plunge that would follow, the shattering of my matchstick body to smithereens, the bones flying free as foam, the heart finally released.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

115. “And the mother, who through all the years of her hardship had never shed a tear, wept at his trust and her deception.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

116. “Why was it that our holy men who made a big deal of giving up so many things – comfort, fame, family – couldn’t seem to give up their tempers?”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

118. “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.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

119. “Maybe it was that sense that comes to us all at some point in the growing-up process, that we are separate from our parents and must suffer our own lives, with our own sorrows. Or maybe it was something simpler, a childish spite, Let her hurt like I’m hurting. And then the light changed and she started driving again.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

121. “In your yearning you have made me into that which I am not.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

122. “And finally, I bless my daughters, who are yet unborn. I pray that, if life tests them – as sooner or later life is bound to do – they’ll be able to stand steadfast and think carefully, using their hearts as well as their heads, understanding when they need to compromise, and knowing when they must not.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

123. “So this, too, was true of love: it could make us forget our own needs. It could make us strong even when the world was collapsing around us.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

125. “I listened mesmerized, visualizing the goddess with her divine mate, wondering if it was possible for humans to replicate this perfect relationship. Would I be blessed with such a love in my life?”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

126. “The choice they made in the moment of my need changed something in our relationship. I no longer depended on them so completely in the future. And when I took care to guard myself from hurt, it was as much from them as from our enemies.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

127. “What is more numerous than the grass? The thoughts that rise in the mind of man. Who is truly wealthy? That man to whom the agreeable and disagreeable, wealth and woe, past and future, are the same. What is the most wondrous thing on earth? Each day countless humans enter the Temple of Death, yet the ones left behind continue to live as though they were immortal.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

128. “Who held his cries in until red swam behind his eyelids like bleeding stars.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

129. “Each desire in the world is different, as is each love.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

130. “How pride had kept them from admitting their mistakes – and.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

131. “Ah, how helpless we children are, how dependent on the whims of adults.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

132. “Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

133. “I closed my eyes and willed my breath to slow, my conscious mind to fold itself inward. I could feel heat pulsing from my daughter’s head, her frantic thoughts whirling like broken glass. I loosened my hold on my body and dropped into that whirlpool.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

134. “Most of all, I understood that things happen to us for many complicated reasons, arising from both the past and the future.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

135. “Anger and self-pity are useless emotions, so I push them away and speak calmly, even though my heart is breaking all over again.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

136. “Why are you attracted to self-sabotage? I.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

137. “To upset the delicate axis of giving and receiving on which our lives are held precarious.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

138. “Forgive me, Sister, I said silently, you who are the unsung heroine of this tale, the one who has the tougher role: to wait and to worry.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

139. “I learned a new fact about love that day: it could kill. Sometimes it could kill instantaneously.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

140. “Never choose something because it’s easier.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

142. “The laws of karma were complicated, and ultimately, one never escaped them.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

143. “Perhaps we are always alone, from the time we leave the safety of our mothers’ wombs until the time Waheguru gathers us to Himself.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

144. “She did understand about sacrificing values for the sake of love. It was a lesson all mothers had to memorize.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

145. “And under it all, earth waited with her lead-filled veins, impatient to shrug herself clean.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

146. “Because a trained mind is your strongest ally – and an untrained one your worst enemy.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

147. “Rage rises up in me until my whole body is scorched, for some kinds of burning don’t require a fire. Not a word of love, not a word of apology for the sorrow he has caused me. Not a word about the unjust and cruel way in which he sent me away. He hasn’t even called me by my name.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

148. “Sarojini admits he has a point; girls have to be toughened so they can survive a world that presses harder on women, and surely Bimal does a good job of that. But deep in a hidden place inside her that is stubborn as a mudfish, Sarojini knows she is right, too. Being loved a little more than necessary arms a girl in a different way.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

149. “All through the history of the world, the virtuous have suffered for causes unseen. Learn from Nal and Damayanti to bear your misfortunes bravely. Like theirs, your evil times, too, will come to an end.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

150. “Rakhi likes the comfortable clutter of her life, the things she loves gathered around her like a shawl against the winterliness of the world.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni