Top 100 S.A. Chakraborty Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I should have been more aggressive in my dowry demands, she suddenly thought. Because she had not been paid enough to marry into this family.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

54. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

57. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

59. “It is not always easy to do the right thing. More often than not, it is a lonely, thankless ordeal. That does not mean it is not worth doing.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

61. “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

62. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

64. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

66. “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

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. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

73. “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

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. “Fussy babies answer to no authority.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

76. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

79. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

81. “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

82. “Perhaps another storyteller long ago decided this was best, just as I briefly held back the truth from you. Or maybe it was an honest mistranslation. We will likely never know.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

84. “There is no living thing that doesn’t desire freedom.”

— S.A. Chakraborty

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

86. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

88. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

90. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

92. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

95. “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

96. “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

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. “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

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

— S.A. Chakraborty

100. “Why are your arrows pointed at him? Target the girl and see how fast the great Scourge surrenders.” The smile vanished from Dara’s face. “Do that, and I will kill every last one of you.”

— S.A. Chakraborty