Top 400 Roshani Chokshi Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “As I got older, the scar reminded me of what people would choose to see if you let them. So I smiled at the attendant, and hoped that she saw a dimpled grin, and not the scar from a girl who started training with very sharp things from a very young age.”

— Roshani Chokshi

52. “Never underestimate the human capacity for betrayal.”

— Roshani Chokshi

53. “Before he came to Alaka, he dared to hope that he was meant for something more. Now he dared to hope that he could shape that meaning for himself. All this time, he had expected that magic would stitch his future together. But all magic had done was show him how to stitch it together for himself.”

— Roshani Chokshi

54. “And in such bliss does devastation grow.”

— Roshani Chokshi

55. “And, more than anything, I began to recognize a little of that woman from the memory. The woman who had pruned a crystal rose in a garden of glass. The woman whom Amar had looked at, as though she held the universe in her gaze, as if galaxies lined her smile, as though she were myths and love and song contained in one body.”

— Roshani Chokshi

56. “It is better, perhaps, to be thought of as a fiction than to be discarded from memory completely.”

— Roshani Chokshi

57. “The world moves to the tune of logic, even if it wears the face of chaos.”

— Roshani Chokshi

58. “I used to think fear either numbed or nudged. Now I knew fear did neither. Fear was a key that fit every person’s hollow spaces – those things that kept us cold at night and that place where we retreated when no one was looking – and all it could do was unlock what was already there.”

— Roshani Chokshi

59. “Existence is the gift. Life is a choice.”

— Roshani Chokshi

60. “Half of winning, my dear wallet, is simply looking victorious.”

— Roshani Chokshi

61. “A particularly good book has a way of opening new spaces in one’s mind. It even invited you to come back later and rummage through what you’d learn.”

— Roshani Chokshi

62. “When you are who they expect you to be, they never look too closely. If you’re furious, let it be fuel.”

— Roshani Chokshi

63. “Idiot. It was just a word. It had no weight, no atomic number, no chemical structure with which it could bind to and thus make it real. But it hurt.”

— Roshani Chokshi

64. “What property is left to dreamers when every idea has been tamed and conquered? What about the poet who dreams of embracing the night sky? It’s utterly impossible. And yet the thought of it sparks song and dance, poetry and philosophy.”

— Roshani Chokshi

65. “Her mother’s voice rang in her ears: ‘Don’t capture their hearts. Steal their imagination. It’s far more useful.”

— Roshani Chokshi

66. “I don’t want to be their equal. I don’t want them to look us in the eye. I want them to look away, to blink harshly, as if they’d stared at the sun itself. I don’t want them standing across from us. I want them kneeling.”

— Roshani Chokshi

67. “Who wanted to be smiled at by the girl that trailed shadows like pets, conjured snakes and waited for Death, her bridegroom, to steal her from these walls?”

— Roshani Chokshi

68. “Aiden really looked at her then. His eyes were wide and dark, but not pure black. There were flashes of blue iridescence in them, like in Urvashi’s eyes. Maybe it was an apsara trait. It made sense to Aru. Apsaras spent so much time dancing in the night skies that maybe their eyes eventually mirrored them.”

— Roshani Chokshi

69. “Fear grew in places unlit by knowledge.”

— Roshani Chokshi

70. “Numbers never lied.”

— Roshani Chokshi

71. “Is it our shame that we’re hiding or our delusions that we can hide at all?”

— Roshani Chokshi

72. “The problem with guilt was not how it attacks the present, but how it stained the past. Hindsight was a blemish on memory.”

— Roshani Chokshi

73. “A soldier’s hand grasped for me, but Amar pulled me away. Arrows zoomed past, but each time one came near, he would whirl me out of the way. Amar never shouted. He didn’t even speak. He moved fluidly, dodging javelins, always a few steps behind me, a living shield. His hood never budged and revealed nothing more than the bottom half of his face.”

— Roshani Chokshi

74. “Vikram hated fear. He hated how it fed on him and stripped away his comfortable blindness. Fear forced him to hold up the contents of his heart to the light.”

— Roshani Chokshi

75. “Though the room was nearly dark, whatever light clung to its corners now raced to illuminate Laila. It seemed the world couldn’t help but want to be near her... every bean of light, pair of eyes, atom of air. Maybe that’s why sometimes he couldn’t breathe around her.”

— Roshani Chokshi

76. “I take inspiration where I can, and devour it in one piece like I’m starving. Not because I think it’s something fleeting that will never return but because I think the best inspiration is the kind that makes you feel urgent. Like you’re racing against yourself to get a story on the page while you still remember what that magic feels like.”

— Roshani Chokshi

77. “The movements so precise it was as if she’d sewn her shadow to the beat.”

— Roshani Chokshi

78. “A circle is a fixed infinity. Even the way it looks when it’s held up to the light is curious, as if it’s a portal to some place of mystery and your choice to wear it means you’ve allowed your marriage to be a threshold to the unknown. And yet, even in the unknown, there is a demand of mutual trust.”

— Roshani Chokshi

79. “My heart was breaking. I thought I knew, finally, what it meant to be a ghost. It meant speaking your words around a mouth full of loss. It meant grasping onto echoes and hoping, praying that the words still meant something.”

— Roshani Chokshi

80. “And perhaps that in itself was the great secret – not just for legacy, but also for life. You could carry a story inside you and hold it up to the light when you needed it the most. You could peer through it, like a frame, and see how it changed your view when you looked out onto the world.”

— Roshani Chokshi

81. “Aru didn’t want to see all those gray spaces between good and bad – she just wanted things to be easy.”

— Roshani Chokshi

82. “Aru was twelve years old. Even she knew that half the time she didn’t know what she was doing.”

— Roshani Chokshi

83. “Death stood on the other side of the chamber doors. Today I would not meet it in my usual armor of leather and chain-mail, but in the armor of silk and cosmetics. One might think one armor was stronger than the other, but a red lip was its own scimitar and a kohl darkened eye could aim true as a steel-tipped arrow. Death might be waiting, but I was going to be a queen. I would have my throne if I would have to carve a path of blood and bone to get it back. Death could wait.”

— Roshani Chokshi

84. “Don’t forget that misguided intentions are often the most dangerous.”

— Roshani Chokshi

85. “So will you see me again before I’m a goat?”

— Roshani Chokshi

86. “Preservation is an innocent desire.”

— Roshani Chokshi

87. “Aasha readied herself. In the other rooms, she heard her sisters squabbling over lost cosmetics and borrowed outfits, arguing over the philosophical merits of one poem compared to another. Their love and gentle fights had been the music of her life for so long. But beyond the tent, a different song called out to her.”

— Roshani Chokshi

88. “The image you see here is a representation of the Thriae, a triplicate bee goddess – a recurring motif of trinity goddesses – who had the gift of prophecy. The other is a representation of Bhramari, a Hindu goddess of bees. Am I pronouncing that correctly, Laila?”

— Roshani Chokshi

89. “Secrets are curious things. They are flimsy and easily broken. For this reason, they prefer to remain hidden.”

— Roshani Chokshi

90. “Fear was a reminder that even the insubstantial could kill. But insubstantial meant it had no shape. It couldn’t be conquered or tamed or avoided. Only moved through, with force and will.”

— Roshani Chokshi

91. “Wolves were everywhere. In politics, on thrones, in beds. They cut their teeth on history and grew fat on war.”

— Roshani Chokshi

92. “Believe that our destinies aren’t chains around our necks, but wings that give us flight.”

— Roshani Chokshi

93. “Sometimes the act of wanting was more intoxicating than the pleasure of realizing the act.”

— Roshani Chokshi

94. “I see only night and smoke, dreams and glass, embers and wings. And I would not have you any other way.”

— Roshani Chokshi

95. “It wasn’t right to honor the dead with inaction.”

— Roshani Chokshi

96. “Maybe that’s why the best laughs tend to break free on the edge of lightless horror. Only then can they gives wings to a drooping spirit.”

— Roshani Chokshi

97. “Lust was one thing, but what she’d felt that night was a pull... the kind that keeps stars from falling out of the night sky. It was vast. It was unlike what she’d imagined.”

— Roshani Chokshi

98. “I don’t know enough to be serious,” he said carefully. “But I’d like to know enough to have options.”

— Roshani Chokshi

99. “This was the same hair that Amar had cut a length of and wrapped a bracelet from its strands, slid it onto his wrist and proclaimed it the finest piece of jewelry he had known.”

— Roshani Chokshi

100. “Sometimes she wondered if grief could break someone, for all of them bore fractures, new hollows.”

— Roshani Chokshi