Top 90 Sonali Dev Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Child, don’t wait until it’s too late. Lost time is lost forever.”

— Sonali Dev

2. “They were surrounded by people, seemingly enjoying the company, but they kept stealing glances at each other as if everything else were just a distraction. It.”

— Sonali Dev

3. “Whatever the case, we want to change things around us. Because we want to matter, and we believe that our work makes us matter. The work isn’t the end, it’s the means for what we really want: to matter.”

— Sonali Dev

4. “Oh, to have the confidence of a mediocre man.”

— Sonali Dev

5. “I want you to love me for me, for now, for as much time as we have. I swear I’ll do all I can to take care of myself. I already do. But that’s it. If that’s enough, I’m yours. If you can only love me if you have a guarantee that I’ll be around forever, then find someone else to be terrified of losing and let me go.”

— Sonali Dev

6. “Our dreams are often too large for reality to ever match up.”

— Sonali Dev

7. “Sometimes you just have to have faith. Sometimes you have to leap first to see if your parachute will open.”

— Sonali Dev

8. “Courage wasn’t only fighting your circumstances; sometimes making peace with your circumstances required more courage.”

— Sonali Dev

9. “Growing up, we were surrounded by stories of women being married off without their consent, and it was always about how they compromised, reconciled, and found love in the end. It was romanticized so much. What an abhorrent thing to tell someone – that your love isn’t where your interest lie, or that your parents know what’s best for you better than you do.”

— Sonali Dev

10. “She could hardly tell him it was because the child had been born a girl, destined from birth to be bound and gagged, to never be free. And she seemed to have sensed it far sooner than most. Sadly, the poor fool seemed to believe that she could actually do something about it.”

— Sonali Dev

11. “There’s a difference between benevolence and stupidity and even God knows it.”

— Sonali Dev

12. “I’d rather have a large life than a long one.” It was a line from a film Bhanu loved. No life could be large in its entirety. Even a life that looked large from the outside was mostly mundane, filled with day-to-day struggles. But if you were lucky, you got to have moments – experiences and relationships – that were so big they made the rest of your life feel large. What I had with Bhanu altered the dimension of my lifetime.”

— Sonali Dev

13. “Ah, fresh young love! It was like the smell of cumin roasting in butter: you couldn’t hide it for anything.”

— Sonali Dev

14. “She had never been the most social person. Rico hadn’t either. They’d been two self-contained teenagers who had somehow cracked each other’s shells and further destroyed each other’s ability to need other people. This version of her, the one who was so acutely aware of people’s reaction to her, made him want to break her loose.”

— Sonali Dev

15. “Dancing is the real plastic surgery,” Uma loved to say. “It’s what keeps you young.”

— Sonali Dev

16. “Time. The starkest truth of life – either you didn’t have enough or then it went on and on.”

— Sonali Dev

17. “But with evil the roots are as deep and branched as the oldest tree. The motivations are such a spiderweb of nature and nurture and choice and anger and greed and hatred all woven into a sticky mess.”

— Sonali Dev

18. “You just have to trust yourself, beta. Focus on what matters to you and don’t let it get all mixed up with what others want.”

— Sonali Dev

19. “You put your soul into something and people think they can pass judgment on it just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I’ll never get used to the critics.”

— Sonali Dev

20. “I wish there was a word for what you’re doing. I wish there was a word for being blind to someone’s situation because you think you know how it feels and you use some tiny part of your own experience and extrapolate it to theirs without realizing that you have a choice and that they have none.”

— Sonali Dev

21. “If only she’d known then that the cycle of belief, which caused the world to work the way it did, could be broken only by disproving one lie at a time. Women were here today, where they had power, where they had a voice, because molecule by molecule, moment by moment, choice by choice, someone had called out the lies peddled as truth. It had been a boulder the size of the earth, and changing the direction of its spin couldn’t happen at one go.”

— Sonali Dev

22. “You should smell the mangoes in India. They smell like sugar melting in the summer heat. How do these have no aroma at all?”

— Sonali Dev

23. “Why was it that it took losing things to recognize the full value of them?”

— Sonali Dev

24. “People think secrets are about lies, or shame. But what secrets are really about is fear.”

— Sonali Dev

25. “Sometimes I don’t know exactly how to navigate what I’m feeling. I don’t know if what I’m feeling is real or right or how to go on around it. I feel several things about one thing and it’s a vortex and I get stuck in it.”

— Sonali Dev

26. “It’s just that sometimes people who appear strongest on the outside can hurt the hardest on the inside.”

— Sonali Dev

27. “When he threaded his fingers through her hair and tugged her lips to his, she had melted in his arms, crumbled into infinite pieces, and allowed every single one of them to merge into him. Her.”

— Sonali Dev

28. “Why is it easier to claim those we lost while forgetting those we rescued?”

— Sonali Dev

29. “You can’t learn anything from losing someone you love. Any lesson you learn from that isn’t a lesson. It’s a compromise with life. A lie you tell yourself.”

— Sonali Dev

30. “Keep your mind where your hands are, her aunt always said, and the future will take care of itself.”

— Sonali Dev

31. “Wealth comes and goes, Rahul. Coming from adversity and overcoming it makes you better not worse than those who never have to.”

— Sonali Dev

32. “Why are we supposed to be ashamed of our own nakedness? Doesn’t that turn the vessel we live in, our most precious possession, into an ugly secret?”

— Sonali Dev

33. “The ever-present tangle of lies tightened around her like a hunter’s net. The more she pushed it away, the more it clung to her like sticky, spindly spiderwebs. But the truth had to remain hidden inside the godforsaken asylum and inside the one of silence that was Uma, Vijay, and her, and tragically enough, Vikram’s mother.”

— Sonali Dev

34. “What could be more than being friends? What could be more than what it felt like to wait by the phone to hear that she was okay? More than waiting to discuss every case with her?”

— Sonali Dev

35. “Yoga made her mind race all over the place instead of centering it, which made all that breathing and stretching pointless.”

— Sonali Dev

36. “But he’d turned it into something beautiful. He’d always turned all her messy, impulsive, unfettered emotion into something beautiful.”

— Sonali Dev

37. “I want you, exactly the way you are today, the way you’ll be tomorrow, and fifty years from now. And I want you to want me enough to deal with whatever happens. I can’t promise you’ll be okay. But without you I will never be okay. And I know that without me you will never be okay either.”

— Sonali Dev

38. “He could smell the readiness of onion in every one of its stages of cooking and knew exactly what stage worked best for each dish. He could identify the exact rapidity with which milk had to boil before adding the lemon to make the cheese curd separate into paneer. He could sense exactly when to add the tomatoes to tie together the onion, garlic, and ginger so that the curry came together perfectly with the oil separating from it in syrupy rivulets.”

— Sonali Dev

39. “Deserve was such a strange word, throwing out both blame and accolades with equal mercilessness. Society’s skewed scale for assigning a value to human beings. How many times had he been judged and found lacking? Was there ever a way to measure what anyone deserved? Or was it just another way to pretend that the randomness of the universe made sense?”

— Sonali Dev

40. “She had learned to use her silence as armor and her memories as escape from the sniggers and name-calling.”

— Sonali Dev

41. “Once the tears started she didn’t know how to stop them. Words and tears – they were the twin gauges of her mental health that took over when she lost control, one drying up, the other oozing from her without consent. She.”

— Sonali Dev

42. “She felt something then, something she had only ever felt with Rahul. It had taken her all these years to be able to name it. It was trust. For whatever reason, she had never once in her life doubted that she would get what she needed from him. Not always what she wanted, but what she really needed.”

— Sonali Dev

43. “Sometimes the people you loved didn’t know what was best for them and you had to be their good sense.”

— Sonali Dev

44. “There was something about Paris that made you feel you could forget who you were.”

— Sonali Dev

45. “The last thing she wanted to dig into was herself.”

— Sonali Dev

46. “The chicken first, because saffron is a lazier flavor in terms of how long it takes to surface and register. Then the roti, because truffle oil and fennel both can overwhelm, unless tempered by a palate already coated with a softer spice.”

— Sonali Dev

47. “The point is that things can be repaired. That they are even more beautiful for having been repaired.”

— Sonali Dev

48. “Why did human beings need love from where they wanted it rather than from where they were getting it?”

— Sonali Dev

49. “It doesn’t matter what my life has been like, Samir. What matters is hope. If you don’t believe in a happy ending, what are you living for?”

— Sonali Dev

50. “She was the kind of star who sold happy dreams. She didn’t want to sell darkness. Pain was best left in the real world where it belonged, where it burrowed so deep you needed a multimillion-dollar industry to escape from it.”

— Sonali Dev