Top 40 Thrity Umrigar Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Women create, Bhima thinks, men destroy. The way of the world.”

— Thrity Umrigar

2. “She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.”

— Thrity Umrigar

3. “Look, I know it’s a risk. But at some point, you have to jump. I’ll either land on my feet or I’ll land on my face. But either way, I’ll own the fall.”

— Thrity Umrigar

4. “You felt a deep sorrow, the kind of melancholy you feel when you’re in a beautiful place and the sun is going down.”

— Thrity Umrigar

5. “And a mother without children is not a mother at all, and if I am not a mother, than I am nothing. Nothing. I am like sugar dissolved in a glass of water. Or, I am like salt, which disappears when you cook with it. I am salt. Without my children, I cease to exist.”

— Thrity Umrigar

6. “Liquor is the kiss of the angels as well as the curse of the devil. It can conceal but also can reveal.”

— Thrity Umrigar

7. “Tomorrow. The word hangs in the air for a moment, both a promise and a threat. Then it floats away like a paper boat, taken from her by the water licking at her ankles.”

— Thrity Umrigar

8. “All these tears shed in the world, where do they go? If one could capture all of them, they could water the parched. Then perhaps these tears would have value and all this grief would have some meaning. Otherwise, it was all a waste, just an endless cycle of birth and death; of love and loss.”

— Thrity Umrigar

9. “Every year when I stands first in my class, Ma gives me the advice: Daughter, she say, never be gamandi. What you have, given to you by God. You just a basket into which God puts the flowers. Flowers not belong to you. They belongs to God. Same way, your clever belong to God.”

— Thrity Umrigar

10. “It isn’t the words we speak that make us who we are. Or even the deeds we do. It is the secrets buried in our hearts.” She looks sharply at Bhima. “People think that the ocean is made up of waves and things that float on top. But they forget – the ocean is also what lies at the bottom, all the broken things stuck in the sand. That, too, is the ocean.”

— Thrity Umrigar

11. “What she had believed was indignation or rage or a deep intolerance for injustice came down to this: she was irreducibly in love with this bewitching planet, this thrilling life, this heartbreaking species she belonged to, with its capacity for stupefying destruction and breathtaking magnanimity.”

— Thrity Umrigar

12. “And so I have to live. Because we live for more than just ourselves, Most of the time we live for others, keep putting one foot before the other, left and right, left and right, so that walking becomes a habit, just like breathing. Ina n out, left and right.”

— Thrity Umrigar

13. “Bhima smiles. “Beti, the past is always present,” she says. “No such thing as bringing it up. The past is like the skin on your hand – it was there yesterday and it is here today. It never goes anywhere. Maybe when you’re older you’ll understand this better.”

— Thrity Umrigar

14. “He had been in the legal profession long enough to know that human behavior was complicated and unpredictable and that justice always had to be tempered with mercy.”

— Thrity Umrigar

15. “Being uncomfortable is good, beta. It’s in discomfort that growth happens.”

— Thrity Umrigar

16. “It was strange how she found out, One moment she didn’t know; the next minute she did. One moment her mind was as blank as the desert; the next minute the snake of suspicion had slithered into her thoughts and raised its poisonous head.”

— Thrity Umrigar

17. “So all I’m saying is, everything that seems important – our quarrels, or philosophical differences – in the end, it doesn’t matter much. You know? In the end, what matters is what remains.”

— Thrity Umrigar

18. “I intend to give my eighty-two-year-old dad a copy of God Never Blinks. I will also buy one for a sixteen-year-old friend. This wise, compassionate, and honest book is a blueprint for living a happy, fulfilling life. Its lessons are timeless – and timely.”

— Thrity Umrigar

19. “Or perhaps is is that time doesn’t heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones – the angle of your hips, the sharpness of your shoulders, as well as the luster of your eyes, the texture of your skin, the openness of your smile – has collapsed under the weight of your griefs.”

— Thrity Umrigar

20. “Think of how far you’ve come,” Maggie said softly. “And then ask yourself how much farther you wish to go.”

— Thrity Umrigar

21. “It doesn’t matter, sister. Too much thinking is bad for health. Now come on, let us sell a few more carrots and brinjals. This is who we are, not poets or philosophers.”

— Thrity Umrigar

22. “But if this is true, surely the body also remembers each kindness, each kiss, each act of compassion? Surely this is our salvation, our only hope – that joy and love are also woven into the fabric of the body, into each sinewy muscle, into the core of each pulsating cell?”

— Thrity Umrigar

23. “Bhima had never known that hate could have such a jagged edge. That it could feel so uncomfortable, a constant, pressing thing, like a pebble in a shoe or a piece of clothing two sizes too small. Nor had she known of hate’s reductive power – how it took every ancient insult, every old betrayal and burning spot. How it soured everything, as if it were a lime squeezed over the whole world.”

— Thrity Umrigar

24. “It isn’t the words we speak that make us who we are. Or even the deeds we do. It is the secrets buried in our hearts.”

— Thrity Umrigar

25. “We all begin with a story of ourselves that we believe to be true. But perhaps true personal change, even healing, can only happen when we change that narrative, when we begin to tell ourselves and others a different story. Surely.”

— Thrity Umrigar

26. “People think that the ocean is made up of waves and things that float on top. But they forget – the ocean is also what lies at the bottom, all the broken things stuck in the sand. That, too, is the ocean.”

— Thrity Umrigar

27. “The clarifying principle made clear the impermanence of things. It was an illusion, all of it – this life that they clung to, this earth that they battled over – a collective exercise in self-deception. The world was perishable.”

— Thrity Umrigar

28. “If I could remove fear from my life, uproot it, who would I be? she wonders. What would it feel like to live for today and let the future remain in the future? How much lighter her burdens would seem.”

— Thrity Umrigar

29. “We can’t be responsible for other people’s reactions to us, Lakshmi,” she said. “We can only make sure our intentions are good.”

— Thrity Umrigar

30. “Her hands were empty now, as empty as her heart, which itself was a coconut shell with its meat scooped out.”

— Thrity Umrigar

31. “You see, I think he could’ve helped me... face what was to come later in my own life. He had the secret, see? The secret of loneliness. How to live with it, how to wrap it around your body and still be able to make beautiful, colorful things, like he did with those balloons. And he could’ve taught it to me, if only I’d asked.”

— Thrity Umrigar

32. “The generosity of the poor, Sera marveled to herself. It puts us middle-class people to shame. They should hate our guts, really. Instead, they treat us like royalty. The thought of how she herself treated Bhima – not allowing her to sit on the furniture, having her eat with separate utensils – filled her with guilt. Yet she knew that if she tried to change any of these rituals, Feroz would have a fit.”

— Thrity Umrigar

33. “When the God enter into your house, he not enter looking like the God. He enter looking like human being. God enter my life looking like Maggie. “Holy cow,” Maggie say, laughing. “I.”

— Thrity Umrigar

34. “Everything that he was saying sounded incredible, but Frank knew enough about politics to know that governments got away with what they did because they counted on ordinary citizens dismissing events as being too incredible and implausible.”

— Thrity Umrigar

35. “This solidarity business I used to talk about ain’t just – what do you youngsters call it? – theoretical. It means putting your body, your physical self, on the line, baby girl. Even when – especially when – it ain’t convenient.”

— Thrity Umrigar

36. “In her time, she has known the evil that men do. But nothing matches with the evil of the Gods, who, having created humanity, now spend their days teasing and testing it.”

— Thrity Umrigar

37. “She is tired of it all – tired of this endless cycle of death and birth, tired of investing any hope in the next generation, tired and frightened of finding more human beings to love, knowing full well that every person she loves will someday wound her, hurt her, break her heart with their deceit, their treachery, their fallibility, their sheer humanity.”

— Thrity Umrigar

38. “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” – FLANNERY O’CONNOR “I.”

— Thrity Umrigar

39. “Human beings could apparently be turned into killers as effortlessly as turning a key. All one had to do was use a few buzzwords: God. Country, Religion. Honor.”

— Thrity Umrigar

40. “Children and flowers,” she said. “How can anyone doubt God exists as long as there’s children and flowers?”

— Thrity Umrigar

41. “But you don’t love something because you’re blind to its faults, right? You love it despite its flaws.”

— Thrity Umrigar

42. “Because a woman can live in one of two houses – fear or love. It is impossible to live in both at the same time.”

— Thrity Umrigar

43. “Because traditions are like eggs – once you break one, it is impossible to put it back inside its shell.”

— Thrity Umrigar

44. “She thought of the self-help books preaching the importance of gratitude that millions of Americans bought each year. How many of them could muster gratitude for a cup of tea?”

— Thrity Umrigar

45. “I will miss you, he said, and his words was both honey and poison, sun and moon in the same sky.”

— Thrity Umrigar

46. “What to do, Smita? She had everything but the gift of years. Nothing we can do. What cannot be cured must be endured.”

— Thrity Umrigar

47. “If her years as a reporter had taught her anything, it was these two things: One, the world was filled with people who were adrift, rudderless, and untethered. And two, the innocent always paid for the sins of the guilty.”

— Thrity Umrigar

48. “Look to the future, child,” her father used to say. “This is why our feet point forward, not back.”

— Thrity Umrigar

49. “Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened.”

— Thrity Umrigar