The Mistress of Spices Quotes

“Each day has a color, a smell.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“How can I forgive if you are not ready to give up that which caused you to stumble?”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Fenugreek, Tuesday's spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. . . . Fennel . . . smelling of changes to come.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Monday is the day of silence, day of the whole white mung bean, which is sacred to the moon.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“...don't create snakes out of ropes. You have enough to worry about.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Hope not built on reason brings disappointment only.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“She lifts a bowl of kheer and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Each desire in the world is different, as is each love.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as reality, an objective and untouched nature of being. Or if all that we encounter has already been changed by what we had imagined it to be. If we have dreamed it into being.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“The mark of a wise man is that he changes his mind when he sees mistake.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Open yourself to the sight, and it will show you what you need to know. But never attempt to bend it to your will. Never pry into a particular life that has been brought to your care. That is to break trust.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“When you begin to weave your own desires into your vision, the true seeing is taken from you.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“O exhilaration, I thought. To be lifted up through the eye of chaos, to balance breath-stopped on the edge of nothing. And the plunge that would follow, the shattering of my matchstick body to smithereens, the bones flying free as foam, the heart finally released.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“When your heart is crusted over with your own pain, it is easy to feel little for others.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Who held his cries in until red swam behind his eyelids like bleeding stars.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“In your yearning you have made me into that which I am not.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Maybe it was that sense that comes to us all at some point in the growing-up process, that we are separate from our parents and must suffer our own lives, with our own sorrows. Or maybe it was something simpler, a childish spite, Let her hurt like I’m hurting. And then the light changed and she started driving again.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“O the irony of desire, always hearkening after the liquid glimmer beyond the distant-most dune. Sometimes only to find that it is no different from the parched sand on which we stood days, months, years ago, in yearning.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“I am turmeric who rose out of the ocean of milk when the devas and asuras churned for the treasures of the universe. I am turmeric who came after the nectar and before the poison and thus lie in between.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“And under it all, earth waited with her lead-filled veins, impatient to shrug herself clean.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“For the first time I admit I am giving myself to love. Not the worship I offered the Old One, not the awe I felt for the spices. But human love, all tangled up, at once giving and demanding and pouting and ardent. It frightens me, the risk of it. And I see that the risk lies not in what I always feared, the anger of the spices, their desertion. The true risk is that I will somehow lose this love.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Spices why must you always compare. Each desire in the world is different, as is each love. You who were born in the world’s dawning know this far better than I. Answer. Weigh it yourself: To him I will give one night, to you the rest of my life, whatever you choose it to be, one hundred years on the island or a single moment, conflagration and consuming, in Shampati’s fire. As”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Most of all we learned to feel without words the sorrows of our sisters, and without words to console them. In this way our lives were not so different from those of the girls we had left behind in our home villages”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“You are thinking, what does it look like, such a knife. Most ordinary, for that is the nature of deepest magic. Deepest magic which lies at the heart of our everyday lives, flickering fire, if only we had eyes to see.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“My heart is filled with passion for the spices, my ears with the music of our dance together. My blood with our shared power. I need no pitiful mortal man to love. I believe this. Wholly.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Spices why must you always compare. Each desire in the world is different, as is each love. You who were born in the world’s dawning know this far better than I. Answer. Weigh it yourself: To him I will give one night, to you the rest of my life, whatever you choose it to be, one hundred years on the island or a single moment, conflagration and consuming, in Shampati’s fire.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices