Bharati Mukherjee > Quotes

“One time you mentioned the loneliness inside of marriage and I did not understand what you were saying. Two people are together; they have come from the same place; they share the same values, the same language. Practically speaking, they are the two halves of one consciousness. They eat the same food; they have a child; they sleep in the same bed, how can they be lonely.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters

“Humor's the hardest thing to translate.”
― bharati mukherjee

“It's making life important, making a single life important, rather than having a prescription for the global ills which afflict us.”
― Bharati Mukherjee

“Love on the decline is hard to tell from love on the rise.” [From 'The Lady from Lucknow']”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Darkness

“The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine

“The divorced Indian lady combines every fantasy about the liberated, wicked Western woman with the safety net of basic submissive familiarity.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters

“How could we have allowed the instinct bred within us over the centuries to draw lines and never cross them, an infinity of lines, ever-smaller lines, ever-sharper distinctions? I grieved for Didi's generation of "girls of good family," who put caste, duty and family reputation before self-indulgence.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters

“Rebellion sounded like a lot of fun, but in Calcutta there was nothing to rebel against. Where would it get you?”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters

“For girls of our class, only a convent-school education would do. This meant that until we reached the age of marital consent, we could be certified (of course) as virgins, but also as never having occupied unchaperoned confined space of any kind with a boy of our own age who was not a close relative.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters

“Where, in Heaven's name, could anyone even be alone in Calcutta? What hanky-panky business, in my mother's words, could go on? Everyone knew the rules and the rules stated caste and community narrowed the range of intimate contact.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters

“If all is equal in the eye of Brahma as the Hindus say, if Allah is all-seeing and all merciful as you say, then who has committed atrocities on the children, the women, the old people? Who has poisoned the hearts of men?”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“But only men destroy and give back nothing.”
― Bharati Mukherjee

“Duty! Duty, judgement! I have heard enough of duty. And of judgement. You cloak your lust for vengeance and for gold and diamonds in the noble words of duty and judgement and protection and sacrifice. But it is the weakest and the poorest and the most innocent who suffer, who sacrifice, whose every minute of every day is obedience to duty.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“The survivor is the one who improvises, not follows, the rules.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“English attitudes saw Islam as a shallow kind of sophistication; Hinduism a profound form of primitivism.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“His interest in India was too acquisitive; he felt he owned it by dint of his own efforts and suffering, and that partial ownership conferred upon him a benevolent proprietorship. Like certain missionaries who combined selflessness and spiritual arrogance, Hedges found himself dissatisfied with both sides, neither of which manifested the pure essence of their cultural selves. The Indians, especially the “Zentoos,” meaning Hindus, were already losing their integrity.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“She saw that her native New World forgetfulness would be forever in conflict with Old World blood-memory.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“She finally accepted how inappropriate it was in India—how fatal—to cling.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Deccani Hill Fort, Devgad, says the guidebook. Vandals and colonials have gouged the jewels from mosaic work: Victorian Englishmen whitewashed the murals, then plastered them over.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories

“He understood something about firangi arrogance, which enabled even flawed, pathetic little men like Tringham to dream of plundering lands they did not know, and did not hate. They really didn’t think that laws applied to them. They tried to walk the world like gods, without armies or servants or gold to protect them, and without the principle of vengeance to ennoble them.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“In India, it takes a classic apprentice five years to learn how to sit at the sitar before he’s allowed to play a note. It’s not just the reaction that says How dare you know? It’s something deeper: How dare you presume to say you know?”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“The blame lies with anyone who confuses protection with power.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Watch me re-position the stars.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine

“What we’re seeing is progressive derangement. God-fearing, land-starved, profit-seeking Welsh and English and Scottish and Irish second sons, jilted by primogeniture, sexually repressed , passion denying, furtively engaging the favours of native women, girls, and boys, all unfolding in the midst of septic heat, rain, disease, squalor, and savage beasts, while being waited on, cooked for, fanned, massaged by servants a thousand times more loyal, submissive, and poorly paid than any in the world, in the middle of the biggest real estate boom, jewel auction and drug emporium of the past five hundred years. No wonder they went a little crazy.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Whose victory? What led to battle?
But Mr. Abraham forecloses on questions. “These people used to build them all the time only.”
These people?
Meaning Muslims and Hindus. Meaning heathens. Mr. Abraham, Christian child of a different intrusion, draws me with a new alacrity toward the cemetery crammed with sunken tombstones.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“You set aggressive men on a course of unstructured competition, and they soon become desperate men in unscrupulous battle.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Our criminal class grew out of good religious native soil.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Money: hand-over-fist money, sweat-of-brow money, burnout money. Finger-to-the-bone money, under-the-table money, black money, dirty money, filthy lucre, money-changing-in-the-temple, thirty-pieces-of-silver money, blasphemous, usurious, treacherous money; profits, taxes, bribes, licenses, fees, levies, octrois, tariffs; middlemen, policemen, watchmen; painters, carpenters, dyers, writers, weavers; doctors, teachers, preachers, judges, accountants, barristers; wives, widows, cooks, servants, slaves, prostitutes, concubines; lewd men, austere men, gamblers, hoarders; Catholics, Roundheads, conformists, Baptists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Parsis, Armenians; black men, brown men, yellow men, white; reformers, saviours, visionaries, criminals; all in pursuit of money, money, money.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“His life was a mystery to her, fabulously rich when he chose to embellish it, but otherwise a blank.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“They had not come to India in order to breed and colonize, or even to convert. They were here to plunder, to enrich themselves.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World