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

“[Herbert] Hoover, had he been challenged with the overpowering implausibility of his notion that economic life is a race that is won by the ablest runner, would have had a ready answer from his own biography: had he not started in life as a poor orphan and worked in the mines for a pittance, and had he not become first a millionaire and then President of the United States? There are times when nothing is more misleading than personal experience, and the man whose experience has embraced only success is likely to be a forlorn and alien figure when his whole world begins to fail.”
― Richard Hofstadter, quote from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death

“You’re not as cold as you pretend to be,’ she said. ‘I think your doors open in different places, that’s all. Most people just don’t know how to get in to you. They knock and they knock where the door is supposed to be, but it’s a blank wall. But you’re there. I’ve watched you. I’ve seen you do some awfully cold things warmly and some warm things coldly. Or does that make sense?”
― Evan S. Connell, quote from Mrs. Bridge

“I thank you, God, who lives always, and Who, as i awaken, has in mercy returned my soul to me; we can ever trust in you.”
― quote from The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew--Three Women Search for Understanding

“We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed

dryness of mouth
after panting

there are books that describe all this
and they are useless”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.