Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni · 322 pages
Rating: (16K votes)
“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.”
“Everytime i have turned the page he re-enters my life as awkward as postscript”
“I guess there's a lot we hope for that never happens.”
“Or perhaps it is just that desire lies at the heart of human existence. When we turn away from one desire, we must find another to cleave to with all our strength --or else we die.”
“Tomorrow is another day. I've got plenty of things to worry about right now.”
“the darkness is a cresting wave. It sweeps me up out of my body until I float among the stars, those tine bright pores on the sky's skin. If only I could pass through them, I would end up on the other side, the right side, shadowless, perfectly illuminated, beyond the worries of this mundane world”
“I have to believe in possibility. How else can we bear the enormous weight of life?”
“...the bird began to carry them to a new life in a new land. We'll be happy ever after, the queen wanted to whisper to her daughter as they flew, but she knew that was not true. Life never is that way. And so instead she held her daughter in silence, heart to heart, and as they traveled each heart drew on the other's strength, so that when they reached their destination they would be ready.”
“...each person is distinct, separate. That ultimately we are each alone”
“Loving someone so deeply was dangerous. It made you too vulnerable.”
“Every person has a heart, but we're not always lucky enough to get a glimpse of it. And every heart, even the hardest, has a fragile spot. If you hit it there, it shatters.”
“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.”
“But when I see Sudha, her face bright with a simple, generous joy, the walls I'd set up so carefully collapse around me like a house of cards. Inside my heart it feels like a wet, new rain. In spite of all my insecurities, in spite of the oceans that'll be between us soon and the men that are between us already, I can never stop loving Sudha. It's my habit, and it's my fate.”
“هل تعتقد أن الحب صنبور نفتحه ونغلقه متى شئنا !”
“They say in the old tales that when a man and a woman exchange looks the way we did, their spirits mingle. Their gaze is a rope of gold binding each to the other. Even if they never meet again, they carry a little of the other with them always. They can never forget, and they can never be wholly happy again.”
“Ah, how helpless we children are, how dependent on the whims of adults.”
“No, Ashok. Love is not a tap. It flows and flows like blood from a wound, and you can die of it.”
“Who am I to say that small joys are less valuable than a passion which shatters your life?”
“Dear Anju, for whom love means that we must want the same thing, always. That we must be the same. She has not yet learned that ultimately each person - even Anjali and Basudha - is distinct, separate. That ultimately we are each alone.”
“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
“She always wanted to believe in things.”
“Life is never going to be boring with Christian, and I’m in this for the long haul. I love this man: my husband, my lover, father of my child, my sometimes Dominant……my Fifty Shades.”
“Sleep was a country for which he could not obtain a visa.”
“We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they're watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they're not seeing you and me. They're watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs--people who don't know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that's quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin "Dear Sire," and congratulate us on the handsomness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.”
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