The Palace of Illusions Quotes

“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

“Your childhood hunger is the one that never leaves you.”
― 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

“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

“Aren't we all pawns in the hands of time, the greatest player of them all?”
― 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

“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

“For men, the softer emotions are always intertwined with power and pride. That was why Karna waited for me to plead with him though he could have stopped my suffering with a single world. That was why he turned on me when I refused to ask for his pity. That was why he incited Dussasan to an action that was against the code of honor by which he lived his life. He knew he would regret it—in his fierce smile there had already been a glint of pain.

But was a woman's heart any purer, in the end?

That was the final truth I learned. All this time I'd thought myself better than my father, better than all those men who inflicted harm on a thousand innocents in order to punish the one man who had wronged them. I'd thought myself above the cravings that drove him. But I, too, was tainted with them, vengeance encoded into my blood. When the moment came I couldn't resist it, no more than a dog can resist chewing a bone that, splintering, makes his mouth bleed.

Already I was storing these lessons inside me. I would use them over the long years of exile to gain what I wanted, no matter what its price.

But Krishna, the slippery one, the one who had offered me a different solace, Krishna with his disappointed eyes—what was the lesson he'd tried to teach?”
― 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

“A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so. And often others see you as you see yourself.” I”
― 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

“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

“...this time I didn't launch into my usual tirade. Was it a memory of Krishna, the cool silence with which he countered disagreement, that stopped me? I saw something I hadn't realized before: words wasted energy.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“Above us our palace waits, the only one I've ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming again like fireflies in a summer evening.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“What did I learn that day in the sabha?
All this time I'd believed in my power over my husbands. I'd believed that because they loved me they would do anything for me. But now I saw that though they did love me—as much perhaps as any man can love—there were other things they loved more. Their notions of honor, of loyalty toward each other, of reputation were more important to them than my suffering. They would avenge me later, yes, but only when they felt the circumstances would bring them heroic fame. A woman doesn't think that way. I would have thrown myself forward to save them if it had been in my power that day. I wouldn't have cared what anyone thought. 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”
― 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

“Doesn’t the imagination always exaggerate—or diminish—truth?”
― 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

“Even the wisest don't know what's hidden in the depths of their being”
― 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

“Distance is a great promoter of harmony:”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“I broke the first rule, the unwritten one, meant not just for warriors but all of us: I took love and used it as a balm to soothe my ego.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“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.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“You could also call it waking,' Krishna continues. 'Or intermission, as one scene in a play ends and the next hasn't yet begun.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“Can our actions change our destiny? Or are they like sand piled against the breakage in a dam, merely delaying the inevitable?”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions