Your childhood hunger is the one that never leaves you.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you’ll spend your life yearning for a man you can’t have.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable–but I always was so, only I never knew it!
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Can’t you ever be serious?’ I said, mortified.’It’s difficult,’ he said. ‘There’s so little in life that’s worth it.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
There was an unexpected freedom in finding out that one wasn’t as important as one had always assumed!
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Expectations are like hidden rocks in your path”all they do is trip you up.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
The heart itself is beyond control. That is its power, and its weakness.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Because ultimately only the witness — and not the actors — knows the truth (Vyasa to Draupadi)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Aren’t we all pawns in the hands of time, the greatest player of them all?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
She who sows vengeance must reap its bloody fruit.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
A situation in itself, he said, is neither happy nor unhappy. It’s only your response to it that causes your sorrow.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Wisdom that isn’t distilled in our own crucible can’t help us.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
I saw something I hadn’t realized before: words wasted energy. I would use my strength instead to nurture my belief that my life would unfurl uniquely.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so. And often others see you as you see yourself.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
time is the great eraser, both of sorrow and of joy.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
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, The Palace of Illusions
wait for a man to avenge your honor, and you’ll wait forever.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
we cannot force ourselves to love or to withhold it. At best, we can curb our actions. The heart itself is beyond control. That is its power, and its weakness.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
But truth, when it’s being lived, is less glamorous than our imaginings.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Even the wisest don’t know what’s hidden in the depths of their being
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Isn’t that what truth is? The force of a person is believing seeps into those around him”into the very earth and air and water until there’s nothing else.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Love. There’s no argument, no matter how strong, that can overcome that word.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Distance is a great promoter of harmony.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
A well-meaning man, Dhai Ma liked to say, is more dangerous because he believes in the rightness of what he does. Give me an honest rascal any day!
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Were the stories we told each other true? Who knows? At the best of times, a story is a slippery thing. Perhaps that was why it changed with each telling. Or is that the nature of all stories, the reason for their power?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Try to remember that you are the instrument and I the doer. If you can hold on to this, no sin can touch you.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
The pleasures that arise from sense-objects are bound to end, and thus they are only sources of pain. Don’t get attached to them. And: When a man reaches a state where honor and dishonor are alike to him, then he is considered supreme. Strive to gain such a state.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Expectations are like hidden rocks in your path all they do is trip you up.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
For isn’t that what our homes are ultimately, our fantasies made corporeal, our secret selves exposed? The converse is also true: we grow to become that which we live within.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
A situation in itself, he said, is neither happy nor unhappy. It’s only your response to it that causes your sorrow.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Love comes like lightning , and disappears the same way..If you are lucky it strikes you right..
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
What is it in us that carves negative impressions so deeply into our brains?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
This is the nature of sorrow; often it fades with time, but once in a while it remains lodged below the surface of things, a stubborn thorn beneath a fingernail, making itself felt every time you brush against it. (How well I knew this, for random events would startle me into the memory of a pair of ancient eyes.)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
You cut out what was once dear to you, ignore the ache in the back of your throat, erase the details you want to forget.
Garrard Conley, Boy Erased
Love, over time, could either blossom or wither, become a source of wonder or a remembered ache.
Garrard Conley, Boy Erased
But love was always moving, always pushing us forward always in action and we often had no choice but to submit to where it lead us.
Garrard Conley, Boy Erased
Sometimes it was what you left unsaid or undone that drew you into a state of wonder.
Garrard Conley, Boy Erased
What did it feel like to not have to think about your every move, to not be scrutinized for everything you did, to not have to lie every day?
Garrard Conley, Boy Erased
Cutting away my roots and the people I loved would transform me into a shell of the person I once was, an automaton stripped of all its gears.
Garrard Conley, Boy Erased
Love could come to you even in a room that seemed drained of it.
Garrard Conley, Boy Erased
Trauma has made dark what was once painfully clear
Garrard Conley, Boy Erased
The conclusion that I’ve come to is that anyone who wants to do anything positive in politics has to be willing to stick with it for a long time without expecting results.
Shivam Shankar Singh, How to win an Indian Election
Politics doesn’t just happen through opinions people express and whose side they take, it also happens through what issues they choose to debate and what issues they ignore.
Shivam Shankar Singh, How to win an Indian Election
The Book Told Me That 