Chitrangada Mukherjee > Chitrangada's Quotes

“A full moon beamed over a love-starved city, in love with itself.”
― Chitrangada Mukherjee, Red is Her Colour: Un-Love Series Book 1

“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”
― Nelson Mandela

“No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognised loneliness when she saw it.”
― Arundhati Roy, द मिनिस्ट्री ऑफ अटमोस्ट हॅपिनेस / THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

“It was love. That pure, naive, untarnished emotion which seeds into you when you read fairy tales. Listen to honey-imbued words served by melodious voices. Avoid looking at your bitter squabbling parents. It skulked into me, making me its home.”
― Chitrangada Mukherjee, Red is Her Colour: Un-Love Series Book 1

“She watches the streaks of rain lashing the window, with the untouched steadiness unique to those accustomed to solitude.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Love is strange they say. An enigma. A pathway to heaven.
A ride to hell.
And a bridge to the space unknown.
You don’t describe love. You experience it.”
― Chitrangada Mukherjee, One Rain Kissed Night

“Our minds are like the universe. How do we know what's hidden in some corner of that space? Beyond the galaxies we know. To places where light doesn't travel...We feel, write, think and argue about what we see. But the unknown exists and sometimes, makes an unexpected appearance. I experienced a part of that unknown through a man.”
― Chitrangada Mukherjee

“I didn't want you thinking that I was stupid and nervy. Nervy more than stupid. Stupid can be vindicated by a turn of phrase, by a dazzling rationale, a profound observation, or a smart quip -- not nervy -- that's permanent damage in front of a woman.
Marc in Red is Her Colour”
― Chitrangada Mukherjee, Red is Her Colour: Un-Love Series Book 1

“11 pm: Heart’s pounding, hands shaking. Have these knots in my stomach. But drinking isn’t an option. Maa is sleeping with me. Baba in Lalitaji’s room. And she on the sofa.
Want to step into the toilet, take one swig, and then go directly to sleep. How the hell will Maa know? I mean she’s sleeping like a log. No, no, shouldn’t. What if she wakes up? She’s a light sleeper, after all.
11.30 pm: No wine. Or vodka. Terrible, terrible night. When will they go back to Kolkata and let me be?
11.32 pm: Chhi . . .Chhi . . . How selfish am I? My parents, one with a heart condition, spent thousands on flight tickets and landed in Chennai. Why? Because they wanted to spend time with their widowed daughter. And what does the daughter want? To sneak into the toilet and take one good swig of wine. Shame on her!
Okay, now I’m being over-dramatic.”
― Chitrangada Mukherjee, Secret Diary of an Incurable Romantic

“Nothing infuriates people more than their own lack of spiritual insight.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Farsi Couplet:
Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast,
Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast.


English Translation:
If there is a paradise on earth,
It is this, it is this, it is this”
― Amir Khusrau, The Writings of Amir Khusrau: 700 Years After the Prophet: A 13th-14th Century Legend of Indian-Sub-Continent

“I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Dry

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.”
― Aldous Huxley , Island