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But Daughter of Drupad? Granted, he hadn’t been expecting me, but couldn’t my father have come up with something a little less egoistic? Something more suited to a girl who was supposed to change history?
“A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so. And often others see you as you see yourself.”
Time is the great eraser, both of sorrow and of joy.
for a story gains power with retelling.
wait for a man to avenge your honor, and you’ll wait forever.
Isn’t that what truth is? The force of a person’s believing seeps into those around him—into the very earth and air and water—until there’s nothing else.”
the power of a man is like a bull’s charge, while the power of a woman moves aslant, like a serpent seeking its prey. Know the particular properties of your power. Unless you use it correctly, it won’t get you what you want.”
I advise you to forget about love, princess. Pleasure is simpler, and duty more important. Learn to be satisfied with them.”
you’re wrong in thinking of woman as an innocent species.”
Perhaps strong women tended to have unhappy marriages?
That seemed to be the nature of boons given to women—they were handed to us like presents we hadn’t quite wanted.
If the sage had cared to inquire, I’d have requested the gift of forgetting, so that when I went to each brother I’d be free of the memory of the previous one.
compendium
I wanted to warn my husbands that one couldn’t depend on a man who plucked frailty and desire so easily out of his heart. How could he have compassion for the faults of others, or understand their need?
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!
And I, having learned more of the workings of women’s power, was careful to offer my opinion only in private, deferring to him always in front of others.
Distance is a great promoter of harmony:
The choice they made in the moment of my need changed something in our relationship. I no longer depended on them so completely in the future. And when I took care to guard myself from hurt, it was as much from them as from our enemies.
“A situation in itself,” he said, “is neither happy nor unhappy. It’s only your response to it that causes your sorrow.
didactic
At what point does forbearance cease to be a virtue and become a weakness?)
I took love and used it as a balm to soothe my ego.
Let the past go. Be at ease. Allow the future to arrive at its own pace, unfurling its secrets when it will.
People love to believe that virtue is rapidly rewarded, and that agitation is the fruit of unrighteousness.
“The life that you’re living today is only a bubble in the cosmic stream, shaped by the karma of other lifetimes. The one who is your husband in this birth was perhaps your enemy in the last, and he whom you hate may have been your beloved. Why weep for any of them, then?”
How little we know our own reputations, I thought with a bitter smile.
Just as we cast off worn clothes and wear new ones, when the time arrives, the soul casts off the body and finds a new one to work out its karma. Therefore the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.
What is it in us that carves negative impressions so deeply into our brains?
war is like an avalanche. Once begun, it cannot cease until it has wreaked all the destruction it is capable of.
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.
Perhaps only when one possessed a greater treasure could one let go of this world.
Wisdom that isn’t distilled in our own crucible can’t help us.
When Arjun asked why man found himself driven to wrongdoing in spite of good intentions, Krishna replied, Because of anger and desire, our two direst enemies.
Stories were important. Even when I was a child, I’d realized that they had to be understood and
preserved for the future, so that we didn’t make the same mistakes over and over.
His laughter was so like that of the men who had killed Abhimanyu that had I not been watching, I couldn’t have told them apart.
I take care of my own—in whichever way possible. The moment when Panchaali gave up struggling with Dussasan and called on me to save her, in that moment your death warrant was signed. If there’s sin in what I did, I’ll gladly shoulder it for her sake.
In this way the chariot of vengeance, which requires no horses or wheels, rolled on.
Who had congregated here to do what nature never required of bird or beast—for it is only we humans that create such tragic duties for ourselves: to identify their dead and perform their final rites.
You call them mine, and you call the others theirs. For shame! Hasn’t this been the cause of your troubles ever since the fatherless sons of Pandu arrived at Hastinapur? If you’d seen them all as yours to love, this war would never have occurred. Wasn’t it the cause of my troubles, too? Of every trouble in this world?
To see a loved one in pain is more wrenching than to bear that pain yourself.
She had traveled past grief to wisdom. Observing her gave me the hope that one day I, too, might complete that journey.
And because of it he would go on, abandoning his dearest ones in the moment of their death, to the ultimate loneliness: to be the only human in the court of the gods.
It strikes me that, like every home where I’ve resided, this body, too—my final, crumbling palace—is beginning to fail me.
It’s only now I see that he’d always been there, sometimes in the forefront, sometimes blended into the shadows of my life. When I thought myself abandoned, he was busy supporting me—but so subtly that I often didn’t notice. He loved me even when I behaved in a most unlovable manner. And his love was totally different from every other love in my life. Unlike them, it didn’t expect me to behave in a certain way. It didn’t change into displeasure or anger or even hatred if I didn’t comply. It healed me. If what I felt for Karna was a singeing fire, Krishna’s love was a balm, moonlight over a
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