Quotes from Queen of Dreams

“Words are tricky. Sometimes you need them to bring out the hurt festering inside. If you don't, it turns gangrenous and kills you. . . . But sometimes words can break a feeling into pieces.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

“Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not static like cutouts; sooner or later they change shape, leading to misunderstanding, loneliness and loss of love.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

“In life, it's best not to take anything for free - unless it's from someone who wishes you well.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

“After the fire, when I'd tried to express my gratitude for their kindness to our customers, they'd been awkward, uncomfortable. My father had had to explain to me that giving thanks is not a common practice in India.
'Then how do you know if people appreciated what you did?' I'd asked.
'Do you really need to know?' my father had asked back.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

“The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

“A dream is a telegram from the hidden world...Only a fool or an illiterate person ignores it.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

“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, quote from Queen of Dreams

“I liked his voice, rich and unself-conscious even when he forgot words and hummed to fill in the gap. What I didn't understand, I imagined, and thus it became a love song.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

“Or is this how humans survive, shrugging off history, immersing themselves in the moment?”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

“I closed my eyes and willed my breath to slow, my conscious mind to fold itself inward. I could feel heat pulsing from my daughter's head, her frantic thoughts whirling like broken glass. I loosened my hold on my body and dropped into that whirlpool.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

“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, quote from Queen of Dreams

“The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it wa sthe same story they were speaking of.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

“Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one that we have dreamed into being. We love people when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not static like cutouts; sooner or later they change shape, leading to misunderstanding, loneliness and loss of love.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from Queen of Dreams

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Popular quotes

“Storms, woman,” [Kaladin] said. “I don’t know what to make of you.”
“Preferably not a corpse.”
“I’m surprised someone hasn't already done that.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Words of Radiance

“She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time. When she'd been young, she'd had an insatiable hunger for more of it, though she hadn't understood why. Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world. The apple tree was still nice to lie near. They peony, for its scent, also fine. When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within.”
― David Wroblewski, quote from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief.

In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what?

But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship.

That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide.

The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also an ugly land with lit He of its past glory remaining or appreciated.

The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives.

Yet the mood of the nation was unmistakably against continuing Mao's policies. Less than a month after his death, on 6 October, Mme Mao was arrested, along with the other members of the Gang of Four. They had no support from anyone not the army, not the police, not even their own guards. They had had only Mao. The Gang of Four had held power only because it was really a Gang of Five.

When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone.”
― Jung Chang, quote from Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“I do believe in shooting the messenger.
You know why? Because it sends a message.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Awakening / The Struggle

“Where do we go from here?"-Kiera
"We go nowhere."-Denny”
― S.C. Stephens, quote from Thoughtless

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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