Top 400 Roshani Chokshi Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Trust is won in years. Not words.”

— Roshani Chokshi

202. “Oh, Zofia,” she said. “Don’t be sad. Everyone hides.”

— Roshani Chokshi

203. “From inside the elephant, the bird had sounded like it could convince a mountain to turn into a volcano. Now it sounded like her math teacher that one time he had tried to perform a cappella but had stepped on a Lego piece.”

— Roshani Chokshi

204. “You once said your soul could never forget mine,” I said, sliding the mended bracelet around his wrist. “Do you remember now?”

— Roshani Chokshi

205. “When I looked up, I could imagine an existence as vast as the sky. Just as infinite. Just as unknown.”

— Roshani Chokshi

206. “I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a flicker of envy. But envy did not make one lovelier. Mother Dhina had taught me that. Beauty, coveted though it was, could not outlive you. Only actions would. I never forgot that. In the harem, I might’ve disliked some girls for the ugliness in their hearts, but never for the beauty of their faces.”

— Roshani Chokshi

207. “The world had a tendency to trick people.”

— Roshani Chokshi

208. “Memories are the grandest illusion of all.”

— Roshani Chokshi

209. “Sometimes weakness wore the face of strength, and sometimes strength wore the face of weakness.”

— Roshani Chokshi

210. “Sometimes life isn’t fair – but that doesn’t mean things happen without reason. We just don’t always know what the reason is. The world is inscrutable. It doesn’t owe you answers. You should only concern yourself with doing your duty.”

— Roshani Chokshi

211. “Where’s the cake?”

— Roshani Chokshi

212. “Guilt is what makes you accountable.”

— Roshani Chokshi

213. “You are the Daughter of Death,” hissed Aru. “You don’t walk into a telephone pole because of a boy.”

— Roshani Chokshi

214. “The pollution that accumulates upon my surface has no bearing on my soul.” Aru nodded to herself. Nice one. Maybe she’d use that excuse next time she didn’t feel like showering.”

— Roshani Chokshi

215. “I will not let us be beings of regret. I know my past. What I want is my future.”

— Roshani Chokshi

216. “He didn’t understand that sometimes the only way to take down what had destroyed you was to disguise yourself as part of it.”

— Roshani Chokshi

217. “I think the greatest power is belief, for what is a god without it?”

— Roshani Chokshi

218. “Sometimes a weakness felt like a blade turned inward, but that meant it was sharp enough that when turned around, it could be a weapon. You just had to be willing to face it and adjust your grip. And that made it magic far more powerful than any celestial weapon.”

— Roshani Chokshi

219. “The only rules to follow were instincts and color palettes.”

— Roshani Chokshi

220. “In Bharata, I guarded myself. Weakness was a privilege. It divided you, snipped out your secrets and gave every sliver power over you. I didn’t have parts to spare. Bharata called me their Jewel, and maybe I was like one. Not sparkling or precious. But a cold thing wearing a hundred faces. Like facets on a gem. One for every person.”

— Roshani Chokshi

221. “It’s only those that deserve nothing that want everything.”

— Roshani Chokshi

222. “As if he had once known how to fly, but the skies had shaken him loose.”

— Roshani Chokshi

223. “I’ve always loved tales of broken lovers who roam through countrysides singing their stories of woe and separation, their honey- sweet longing for the next life when they can suddenly be re united. It makes other people happy, you see. It makes people grateful that it hasn’t happened to them.”

— Roshani Chokshi

224. “Night coaxed out the stars, my jailers.”

— Roshani Chokshi

225. “I never glanced at the moon for the next week. I knew, buried beneath my happiness, that it was temporary and that sooner or later I would have to pull Vikram’s thread, but I ignored it. I was too lost in the magic of Akaran and Amar.”

— Roshani Chokshi

226. “That was a lie. Of course I remembered. The memory pounced on me the moment I fell asleep. Fire painted my bones when I kissed him. In the back of my head, I’d felt the kind of drowsy hunger that lit up my thoughts when I first ate demon fruit. For more and less. For something impossible.”

— Roshani Chokshi

227. “You can tell a lot about a person from the way they occupied space.”

— Roshani Chokshi

228. “Now that they’d stopped running, Aru realized she was still holding the silver fruit. It was cold in her hands. Curious, she raised it to her face and inhaled deeply. Aru had never smelled a fruit like this... It didn’t give off a scent as much as a feeling. It felt like a moment on the verge of passing. Hot cocoa on the brink of turning cold. The end of a good book. The prickling sense of waking up that always cuts a good nap short. It made her happy and sad all at once. She lost herself in it.”

— Roshani Chokshi

229. “As he walked out the door of his study, a phantom ache curled between his shoulder blades. As if they craved the weight of wings.”

— Roshani Chokshi

230. “Enrique had brought her a cookie and made her laugh, and it felt like sitting beside a fire in one’s own home, knowing exactly where everything was and who would come to the door.”

— Roshani Chokshi

231. “Love is like Death without the guarantee of its arrival. Love may not come for you, but when it does it will be just as swift and ruthless as Death and just as blind to your protestations. And just as Death will end one life and leave you with another, so will Love.”

— Roshani Chokshi

232. “Vikram’s eyes widened. “What’s this? Praise from Her Beastliness in the morning? Are you under a curse that makes you friendly before noon? If so, how do we make it permanent?”

— Roshani Chokshi

233. “Punctuality, with its unseemly whiff of eagerness, was for peasants.”

— Roshani Chokshi

234. “Find the one who glows, with blood on the lips and fangs in the heart.”

— Roshani Chokshi

235. “The sage smiled. Sometimes a smile was little more than a sliver of teeth. And sometimes a smile was a knife cutting the world in two: before and after.”

— Roshani Chokshi

236. “Swords could also be used for freeing. You could’ve cut through the chain around the bird’s foot and set it free. Swords could be used for killing. But it needn’t be the bird. Wouldn’t the more merciful choice have been to use the sword against the oppressor?”

— Roshani Chokshi

237. “In my experience, big words ornament bad news.”

— Roshani Chokshi

238. “But for the first time, I wanted to believe in the things that outlasted us: the stories that came to life in a child’s head, the fear of the dark, the hunger to live. Those were the footsteps that not even Time could discover and erase, because they lived far out of reach, in the song of blood coursing through veins and in the quiet threads that made up dreams. I wanted to hold the hope of those tales within me and follow it like a lure all the way back to myself.”

— Roshani Chokshi

239. “How many times have answers been so simple and yet someone is determined to take the path of thorns instead of roses?” “It’s not earned.” “That’s a very human thing to say.” “An inclination I can’t help.” “It’s not about things that are earned, but just things as they are.”

— Roshani Chokshi

240. “You see, a truth parted with has its own way of becoming a tale. It is told so often that it stumbles in the telling, little bits flaking off, little bits sticking on, and the years accrete and they tend to warp the truth, press it into something it was not at the beginning – not a lie, but a tale. It’s easier to see the truth when you disguise it.”

— Roshani Chokshi

241. “No matter what happens to us, we have choices. We choose how to look at our lives. We choose what we can live with, and what we cannot, and only you can decide.”

— Roshani Chokshi

242. “Sometimes we women are our own worst traps. Our hopes snatch us like quicksand. Our loneliness forges a cage. Sometimes all it takes is one sweet glance and kind word to make us forget ourselves.”

— Roshani Chokshi

243. “Nightmares are part of sleeping.”

— Roshani Chokshi

244. “Enough tiny sharp jabs can cut as deeply as any knife.”

— Roshani Chokshi

245. “His smile banished my loneliness and limbed the hollows of my anema with starlight, pure and bright... his touch hummed in my bones like an aria – a song to my dance, a beginning of a promise.”

— Roshani Chokshi

246. “I could have been verse made flesh or compressed moonlight. Anything other than who I was now.”

— Roshani Chokshi

247. “I reached out to hold a daydream. They looked like they were spun from glass and yet their touch was silk-soft. As they drifted between my fingers, I felt them – a nap in the sleepy sunshine of a winter afternoon, a reverie where a sea alight with flowers and bright candles washed over my ankles.”

— Roshani Chokshi

248. “Love looked different to everyone.”

— Roshani Chokshi

249. “Imagine having to live in a place like this,” she said through chattering teeth. “You’d have to pick your nose all the time just so that your boogers wouldn’t freeze into icicles and stab the inside of your nose.”

— Roshani Chokshi

250. “Was this what being an older sister was like? Wanting to yell at someone most of the time but still be willing to jump in front of a car for them? If so, it was awful.”

— Roshani Chokshi