Quotes & Sayings About Durga

Devi-Mahatmayam has special meaning for spirituality,
With illumination, wisdom, strength - to freedom finally!
- 150 - — Munindra Misra

I have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach that Gandhi is advocating. — Muhammad Ali Jinnah

There's might too in the incomplete. In feeling fractional. A failure to carry out is perhaps no failure at all, but rather a minced metric of splendor. The ongoing. The outlawed. The no-patrol. The act of making loose. Of not doing as you've been told. Of betting on miscalculations and cul-de-sacs. Why force conciliation when, from time to time, long-held deep breaths follow what we consider defeat? Why not want a little mania? The shrill of chance, of what's weird. Of purple hats and hiccups. Endurance is a talent that seldom worries about looking good, and abiding has its virtues even when the tongue dries. The intention shouldn't only be to polish what we start but to acknowledge that beginning again and again can possess the acquisitive thrill of a countdown that never reaches zero. Groping — Durga Chew-Bose

In the loudest voice I could muster, I shouted, "As of this moment, you are no longer the armies of China, Macedonia, Myanmar, Tibet or India. You are now warriors of Durga! We have already fought and overcome many fierce creatures. Now we give you the symbol of their power."
I borrowed the Scarf and touched it to my Pearl Necklace. The silken material sped down each and every soldier to cloak them in the most brilliant red, blue, green, gold and white. Even the flag bearers were not left out and now held banners depicting Durga riding her tiger into battle.
"Red for the heart of a Phoenix that sees through falsehood!" I cheered and raided the trident. "Blue for the Monsters of the Deep that rip apart those who dare to cross their domain! Gold for Metal Birds that cut their enemies with razor beaks! Green for the Horde of Hanuman that comes alive to protect that which is most precious! And white for the Dragons of the Five Oceans, whose cunning and power has no equal! — Colleen Houck

I picked up the statue and looked at it from different angles. The eight arms were fearsome. Note to self: in a battle against Durga, run the other direction. — Colleen Houck

Forty feet long sixty feet high hotel
Covered with old gray for buzzing flies
Eye like mango flowing orange pus
Ears Durga people vomiting in their sleep
Got huge legs a dozen buses move inside Calcutta
Swallowing mouthfuls of dead rats
Mangy dogs bark out of a thousand breasts
Garbage pouring from its ass behind alleys
Always pissing yellow Hooghly water
Bellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddles
Coughing lungs Sound going down the sewer
Nose smell a big gray Bidi
Heart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracks
Covered with a hat of cloudy iron
Suffering water buffalo head lowered
To pull the huge cart of year uphill — Allen Ginsberg

It's imperative that writing consists of not living up to your own taste. Of leaving the world behind so you can hold fast to what's strange inside; what's unlit. A soreness. A neglected joy. The way forward is perhaps not maintaining a standard for accuracy but appraising what naturally heaps. Writing — Durga Chew-Bose

Is there something to be learned from fast tenderness that wanes just as fast as it forms? — Durga Chew-Bose

And besides, it feels more covert to have no evidence. To believe that something you've experienced will build on your extent - your extent as a person who sees things, and is moved by things - without ever having to prove those things happened exactly as they happened. — Durga Chew-Bose

The sheer, ensorcelled panic of feeling moved. — Durga Chew-Bose

Parvati has wrathful incarnations surely,
As Durga, Kali, Shitala Devi, Tara, Chandi,
She has benevolent forms like Katyayani,
Kamalatmika, Bhuvaneshwari, Lalita, Gauri.
Parvati as the Goddess of Power does be,
Who source of all forms and of all beings be,
In Her all the power but exists undoubtedly,
And She who the destroys all fear clearly be.
The apparent contradiction that Parvati be,
The fair one, Gauri, and the dark one, Kali,
Suggests the placid wife, can change fully,
To her primal chaotic nature as powerful Kali. — Munindra Misra

Isn't it fun to read a sentence that races ahead of itself? — Durga Chew-Bose

A woman carries her inner life - lugs it around or holds it in like fumes that both poison and bless her - while nourishing another's inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind. — Durga Chew-Bose

Memory is trust open to doubt. Perhaps — Durga Chew-Bose

The world which worships Mother Mary and goddess Durga also has experienced such heinous crimes against her daughters. — Debajani Mohanty

For feverish mornings after he left, she lay awake in that guest room in their house, in the rumples of the sheet he had slept in. She would get him on every turn: his aftershave lingering on the sides of the pillow that sometimes caught her, waking up from her dreams of him, in nuclear nights, his gaze: drenching her like water drops on burning rocks. She herself didn't have any smell. He had to really lean in the first time to make out the attar amidst the freckles on her neck. And then there would be at least two, never only one: Jasmine and that other thing that he could never place- a smell that was between imitation pearls and the insides of a Durga Puja afternoon. On some days even in Simla, this she, would waft in by his collars nonchalantly.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') — Kunal Sen

It was Durga Pujo, the city's most anticipated days. The stores, the sidewalks, were overflowing. At the ends of certain alleys, or in gaps among buildings, she saw the pandals. Durga armed with her weapons, flanked by her four children, depicted and worshiped in so many versions. Made of plaster, made of clay. She was resplendent, formidable. A lion helped to conquer the demon at her feet. She was a daughter visiting her family, visiting the city, transforming it for a time. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I don't require much to feel far-removed; to impose my wanderings on what's close. Because of this, my friend and I have started calling ourselves nook people. Those of us who seek corners and bays in order to redeploy our hearts and not break the mood. Those of us who retreat in order to cubicle our flame. Who collect sea glass. Who value a deep pants pocket. Who are our own understudies and may as well have shadowboxes for brains. We — Durga Chew-Bose

Because there is trust too, in feeling small. — Durga Chew-Bose

They experienced the world, I supposed, as I experienced going to the movies: that flash of amazement petitioned, in part, from feeling small in the presence of bigness. — Durga Chew-Bose

The whole Esther Williams of it all. The ostrich ballet. Like pirouetting feather dusters; their paddle feet in fourth position. — Durga Chew-Bose

Memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. Memory isn't a well but an offshoot. It goes secretly. Comes apart. Deceives. It's guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you've emotionalized. And — Durga Chew-Bose

No matter how lackluster its surroundings, within seconds, all was new again for a goldfish because it had figured out how to repair its sense of spectacle. There — Durga Chew-Bose

Nook people are those of us who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room. — Durga Chew-Bose

Women who are in no rush to respond to a world that's only conceived them as its consequence. — Durga Chew-Bose

Durga needs a tiger. — Colleen Houck

The genius of the word is that it's more of an expression than a word. Nook — Durga Chew-Bose

Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment. Letting form pass through you. — Durga Chew-Bose

There's strength in observing one's miniaturization. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn't smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance, the momentum gained from reading a great book. After after, sitting, sleeping, living in its consequence. A book that makes you feel, finally, latched on. — Durga Chew-Bose

A nook person finds the dog at the party; drinks wine from a mug; sits on the floor and braids carpet tassels only to become self-conscious and unbraid them. — Durga Chew-Bose

Then again, maybe that's why I'm drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities. Before — Durga Chew-Bose

Even when I was nothing, I was arriving. This — Durga Chew-Bose

The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali's appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny. — Amit Chaudhuri

Change, I've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable. — Durga Chew-Bose

Durga wore a simple sea-green dress and a lei of lotus flowers ... "Take this," it has no special power except that the blooms will not fade, but it will serve a purpose on your voyage. I want you to learn the lesson of the lotus. This flower springs forth from muddy waters. It raises its delicate petals to the sun and perfumes the world while, at the same time, its roots cling to the elemental muck, the very essence of the mortal experience. Without that soil, the flower would wither and die." She placed the lei over my neck. "Dig down and grow strong roots, my daughter, for you will stretch forth, break out of the waters and find peace on the calm surface at last. You will discover that if you hadn't stretched, you would have drowned in the deep, never to blossom or share your gift with others. — Colleen Houck

Parents who experience pause from "the unnecessary beauty of an ice storm coating trees," while their kids - who "bewilder well," she writes - are simply looking for something to throw. — Durga Chew-Bose

I find the plainness and economizing record of materials handled calming. Realistic yet not austere, because what corresponds - the words oil on canvas - has everything and nothing to do with what I'm looking at. — Durga Chew-Bose

From the simple stringing together of lemon garlands for the goddess Durga, to dividing the prasadam or blessed foods for the children first, I came to associate food not only with feminity, but also with purity and divinity. — Padma Lakshmi

Writing is losing focus and winning it back, only to lose it once more. — Durga Chew-Bose

Nook people express appreciation in the moment by maintaining how much we will miss what is presently happening. Our priorities are spectacularly disordered. A nook person might spend the last few years of her twenties thinking she is dying. Convinced of it. Nook — Durga Chew-Bose

To this day, watching a woman mindlessly tend to one thing while doing something else absorbs me. Like securing the backs of her earrings while wiggling her feet into her shoes. Like staring into some middle distance, where lines soften, and where she separates the relevant from the immaterial. — Durga Chew-Bose