Famous Quotes & Sayings

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 51 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Bharati Mukherjee.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1172985

I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 572760

I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1762332

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.' — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1977451

Rebellion sounded like a lot of fun, but in Calcutta there was nothing to rebel against. Where would it get you? — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1380536

One of the early tip-offs to me about the enormous changes that were going on with being in a Bangalore house, home, where the young woman from a nearby village, who had been hired to baby sit newborn twins, suddenly said after two weeks of work: 'I'm sorry, this is too much work, I'm going to try applying for call center jobs. The pay is better.' — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 2062454

I never have my CNN off, it's on the whole day. I don't want to be out of range of television. I'm constantly bombarded by information - Somalia one second, Haiti the next - I need that constant pounding. I couldn't write without television. I need to have the world in my room. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1661396

I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1653313

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1349663

It's making life important, making a single life important, rather than having a prescription for the global ills which afflict us. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1578676

The divorced Indian lady combines every fantasy about the liberated, wicked Western woman with the safety net of basic submissive familiarity. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1133953

My mother's rules had to do with feminine deportment, so I never played hard enough to break a toy or muddy my dress. My father's rules had to do with never shaming the family by even a hint of scandal, and not providing business rivals with an opportunity to kidnap me or throw acid in my face. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 460573

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wanted ... I needed pencils for school, I needed a notebook, they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 956277

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1974068

I thought of America as Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner sprawled on the edge of a Hollywood swimming pool biting into the same red apple. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1630601

I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!' — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1669807

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one's individuality. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1460710

The picture of Mother Teresa that I remember from my childhood is of a short, sari-wearing woman scurrying down a red gravel path between manicured lawns. She would have in tow one or two slower-footed, sari-clad young Indian nuns. We thought her a freak. Probably we'd picked up on unvoiced opinions of our Loreto nuns. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1451691

Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.' — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1366408

I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1657860

The United States exists as a sovereign nation. 'America,' in contrast, exists as a myth of democracy and equal opportunity to live by, or as an ideal goal to reach. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1236828

The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1675214

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1891740

Humor's the hardest thing to translate. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1914288

But, Christ, there's a difference between exotic and foreign, isn't there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1959891

I have to put down roots where I decide to stay. It wasn't enough for me to be an expatriate Indian in Canada. If I can't feel that I can make social, political and emotional commitments to a place, I have to find another place. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 2124717

[On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 2127716

I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 2249253

Dullness is a kind of luxury. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 725729

In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 155686

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 214001

One time you mentioned the loneliness inside of marriage and I did not understand what you were saying. Two people are together; they have come from the same place; they share the same values, the same language. Practically speaking, they are the two halves of one consciousness. They eat the same food; they have a child; they sleep in the same bed, how can they be lonely. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 226572

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children? — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 231043

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 263716

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 306200

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.' — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 318209

In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 384167

Love on the decline is hard to tell from love on the rise." [From 'The Lady from Lucknow'] — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 422390

As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 599481

My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 721814

A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1349035

For girls of our class, only a convent-school education would do. This meant that until we reached the age of marital consent, we could be certified (of course) as virgins, but also as never having occupied unchaperoned confined space of any kind with a boy of our own age who was not a close relative. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 808368

I don't feel the depression the people who are always looking back to the '50s, to 'Father Knows Best' feel. I can see the coming of another glorious era. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 863626

What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire? — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 863853

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 969432

You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new person ... What America offers me is romanticism and hope ... Suddenly, I found myself in a country where — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1061106

How could we have allowed the instinct bred within us over the centuries to draw lines and never cross them, an infinity of lines, ever-smaller lines, ever-sharper distinctions? I grieved for Didi's generation of "girls of good family," who put caste, duty and family reputation before self-indulgence. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1129852

Mother Teresa's detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans' destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless. In the context of lost causes, Mother Teresa took on battles she knew she could win. Taken together, it seems to me, the criticisms of her work do not undermine or topple her overall achievement. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1216629

Where, in Heaven's name, could anyone even be alone in Calcutta? What hanky-panky business, in my mother's words, could go on? Everyone knew the rules and the rules stated caste and community narrowed the range of intimate contact. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 103545

We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It's a question of time, not motive. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1285684

My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee Quotes 1303858

Lepers were a common sight all over India and in every part of Calcutta, but extending help beyond dropping a coin or two into their rag-wrapped stumps was not. As a child I was convinced even touching a spot a leper had rubbed against would lead to infection. — Bharati Mukherjee