Top 100 S.A. Chakraborty Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I find politics loathsome.” “Do you?” Muntadhir waved about the courtyard. “And what do you think all this is if not politics? I find that those who look on politics with contempt are usually the first to be dragged down by them.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

52. “I find I can get a more accurate measure of a man when he’s not aware he’s being appraised.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

53. “Find your happiness, little thief. Steal it and do not ever let it go.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

54. “He who dares does while he who fears fails.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

55. “Often the mightiest things have the humblest beginnings.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

56. “For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

57. “Shut up, Dara.” And then she kissed him again.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

58. “Scattered minds are the enemy of magic.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

59. “But I still believe, desperately, in the power of stories. If you take any message from this trilogy, I hope it is to choose what’s right even when it seems hopeless – especially when it seems hopeless. Stand for justice, be a light, and remember what it is we were promised by the One who knows better. With every hardship comes ease.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

60. “For the greatest crime of the poor in the eyes of the wealthy has always been to strike back. To fail to suffer in silence and instead disrupt their lives and their fantasies of a compassionate society that coincidentally set them on top. To say no.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

61. “We’re souled beings like humans, but we were created from fire, not earth.” A delicate tendril of orange flame snaked around his right hand and twisted through his fingers. “All the elements – earth, fire, water, air – have their own creatures.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

62. “The djinn – no, the daeva, she corrected herself – narrowed his eyes. “You’re some kind of thief, then?” “That’s a very narrow-minded way of looking at it. I prefer to think of myself as a merchant of delicate tasks.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

63. “My ancestors had attuned their lives to the sea for far too long for me to forget its rhythms.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

64. “She didn’t want to talk about any of this. She survived trauma by suppressing it, by shoving back the grief and rage that would otherwise swallow her whole.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

65. “Zaynab used to spout little water fountains in drinking cups when she didn’t think I was watching her. – Hatset.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

66. “I have traveled widely enough that I take everything written about “foreigners” with doubt and know better than to judge a community by their worst individuals.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

67. “For while the pious claim money doesn’t buy happiness, I can attest from personal experience that poverty buys nothing.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

68. “She wanted their certainty in a higher power, a meaning to the cruelly chaotic violence that plagued their world.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

69. “Do you like your men tall, dark, and hostile?”

— S.A. Chakraborty

70. “The favorite son of the djinn king, and she’d snatched him back from death. There was power in that.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

71. “I am a believer, after all, and we are told to look for signs.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

72. “It’s not as though the Egyptians were the inheritors of a great civilization whose mighty monuments still littered the land. Oh, no. They were peasants, superstitious fools who ate too many beans.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

73. “The truth scarcely matters when it comes to a good tale.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

74. “Contrary to the pandemonium that characterised the rest of her life, she was typically cautious with healing, and her years in the infirmary had only made her more careful. It was a responsibility and a privilege to be entrusted with a patient’s life, not a thing she took lightly.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

75. “To be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

76. “Is it not the job of parents to reassure their children?”

— S.A. Chakraborty

77. “We have a verse like that – like what Nisreen said. We say God is the light of the heavens and the earth, that it’s a light steady and protected as a lamp behind glass and shines as brightly as a star. That it is always there to guide us.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

78. “She gazed upon the ruined hospital. “The work is what matters. You fix what you can and keep yourself whole enough to move on to the next patient.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

79. “Are not all mothers capable of being monsters when it comes to their children?”

— S.A. Chakraborty

80. “Is there any stare like that belonging to your children, the kind that fills you with love and responsibility at once?”

— S.A. Chakraborty

81. “For a people who honored the ascent and descent of the sun, marking the first and last glimpse of its burning orb with quiet gratitude to their Creator, this time farthest from its presence was meant for being safe and asleep with their loved ones, a fire altar burning to keep the demons out. But Dara had no loved ones and was a demon himself, so here he was.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

82. “Fussy babies answer to no authority.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

83. “Every time I think there’s no lower our world can sink, we all plunge deeper.” “Some of us rise,” she countered.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

84. “It is not blasphemous to say this world is vast, that much of its history remains shrouded. There are things God set beyond our understanding.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

85. “For Nahri was going to bring forth a world in which her mother would have been free.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

86. “I find that those who look on politics with contempt are usually the first to be dragged down by them.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

87. “I wanted to travel the world and sail every sea. I wanted to have adventures, to be a hero, to have my tales told in courtyards and street fairs, where perhaps kids who’d grown up like me, with more imagination than means, might be inspired to dream. Where women who were told there was only one sort of respectful life for them could listen to tales of another who’d broken away – and thrived when she’d done so.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

88. “People have this idea of mothers, that we are soft and gentle and sweet. As though the moment my daughter was laid on my breast, the phrase I would do anything did not take on a depth I could have never understood before.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

89. “If I have learned anything in my years of work, it is to never underestimate the pride of young men.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

90. “Instead, I fell back into the routines of family and harvest, which meant on the day I returned to a life of misadventure, I was locked in battle with the constant enemy of my retirement: my roof.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

91. “It was suddenly clear why – over a thousand years later – Dara’s name still provoked terror among the djinn.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

92. “He glanced at the goats with a frown. “Get one? Why?” His confusion turned to revulsion. “You mean to eat?” He made a disgusted sound. “Absolutely not. We don’t eat meat.” “What? Why not?” Meat had been a rare luxury on her limited income in Cairo. “It’s delicious!” “It’s unclean.” Dara shuddered. “Blood pollutes. No Daeva would consume such a thing.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

93. “The new migrants arrived with little more than the clothing on their backs and the traditions of their ancestors, traditions often denounced as perversions by some of the city’s more irritated imams.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

94. “Fine.” I gave in. “Come die with us.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

95. “Aye, darling, do you like what you see?” she asked in accented Djinnistani. She licked her lips, causing his heart to skip several beats, and nodded to the jeweled collar around his neck. “You look like you could afford me.” Anas stepped between them. “Lower your eyes, brother,” he chided gently. Embarrassed, Ali dropped his gaze.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

96. “Where was the line between God’s plan and something being too good to be true?”

— S.A. Chakraborty

97. “It was as though someone had created an image of a person, a man out of clay, but forgotten to give it a final spark of life. He was... unfinished.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

98. “You just want to go on an adventure, old man,” Dalila teased.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

99. “It was done, it was quick. Ali let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

100. “Amina; if you insist on going in alone, at least stop caressing your dagger.”

— S.A. Chakraborty