K S Chitra Quotes & Sayings

In your yearning you have made me into that which I am not. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Each day has a color, a smell. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Kaushik, what about a picture?" my father suggested. I shook my head. I had left my camera, my father's old Yashica, at school. "But you always have it with you." That look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day my mother died and was missing now that he'd married Chitra, passed briefly across my father's face. "I forgot it," I said. It was true, I did always have the camera with me. Even on quiet weekends when I came home and my father and I saw no one I would bring it, taking it with me on walks. This time I had left it behind, knowing that I would not want to document anything. "I don't understand," my father said. "Neither do I," I replied. "You haven't wanted a picture of anything in years." "That's not true." "It is." We were stating facts and at the same time arguing, an argument whose depths only he and I could fully comprehend. — Jhumpa Lahiri

And the mother, who through all the years of her hardship had never shed a tear, wept at his trust and her deception. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

When your heart is crusted over with your own pain, it is easy to feel little for others. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I was caught on the freeway for hours when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The entire city had to be evacuated. I observed lives threatened by catastrophes and a whole range of behaviour. What could people do during a crisis? — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Who held his cries in until red swam behind his eyelids like bleeding stars. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Pain makes us crazy. All we want is to throw the live coal of it as far from us as we can, not thinking what we might set afire. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Rakhi likes the comfortable clutter of her life, the things she loves gathered around her like a shawl against the winterliness of the world. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

why man found himself driven to wrongdoing in spite of good intentions, Krishna replied, Because of anger and desire, our two direst enemies. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Everyone breathes in air, but it's a wise person who knows when to use that air to speak and when to exhale in silence. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Would you like to come in?" I said. My hands were sweaty. Inside my chest an ocean heaved and crashed and heaved again.
"I would," he said. I saw his Adam's apple jerk as he swallowed. "Thank you."
I was distracted by that thank you. We had moved past the language of formality long ago. It was strange to relearn it with each other. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

To achieve important things, we have to sacrifice what's important to us. That's an idea that's very central to Indian thinking. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I wrote 'Mistress of Spices' at an unusual time when I had a near-death experience after the birth of my second son. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

By the time we're adults, our ideas have solidified. So I wanted to write for a younger audience, who would perhaps love heroes from other cultures. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

As I lived on in America, I got to truly know the people of this country - so many kind and wonderful people, people of so many races - who helped me in so many ways. Who became my friends. I realized that underneath our different accents, habits, foods, religions, ways of thinking, we shared a common humanity. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I tried to hold on to this compassion, sensing its preciousness, but even as I reached to grasp it, it dissipated into wisps. No revelation can endure unless it is bolstered by a calm pure mind- and I'm afraid I didn't possess that. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I started putting down my thoughts on paper out of loneliness while I was studying in America. I was very close to my grandfather, and when he died, I couldn't visit home. I started scribbling those thoughts. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Can our actions change our destiny? Or are they like sand piled against the breakage in a dam, merely delaying the inevitable? — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Behind those homes was Mass General, where my father and I had gone together so many times. A phone call had woken us in the early hours one morning, and we had driven down to Boston just as the first light was intruding with harsh orange streaks in the sky. She looked the same as the night before, lying in the bed with her eyes closed, only all the machines were shut off, making the room in which we had spent so many quiet hours all the more silent. Her skin felt chilled when I touched it, as if she had just returned from a brisk walk in winter. I looked up now at the windows of the hospital, but my father turned toward Chitra. — Anonymous

To upset the delicate axis of giving and receiving on which our lives are held precarious. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Pain, which is ultimately only like itself. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

A book can be wonderful and powerful and accessible and artful all at the same time. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I want to weep too, not for me but for us all
for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Hope not built on reason brings disappointment only. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I write best late at night, when everyone in the house has gone to bed. There's something magical about that late night silence that appeals to me. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable
but I always was so, only I never knew it! — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I have to believe in possibility. How else can we bear the enormous weight of life? — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

That's how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni