Queen of Dreams Quotes

“Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not static like cutouts; sooner or later they change shape, leading to misunderstanding, loneliness and loss of love.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“Words are tricky. Sometimes you need them to bring out the hurt festering inside. If you don't, it turns gangrenous and kills you. . . . But sometimes words can break a feeling into pieces.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“In life, it's best not to take anything for free - unless it's from someone who wishes you well.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“Everyone breathes in air, but it's a wise person who knows when to use that air to speak and when to exhale in silence.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“After the fire, when I'd tried to express my gratitude for their kindness to our customers, they'd been awkward, uncomfortable. My father had had to explain to me that giving thanks is not a common practice in India.
'Then how do you know if people appreciated what you did?' I'd asked.
'Do you really need to know?' my father had asked back.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“Or is this how humans survive, shrugging off history, immersing themselves in the moment?”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“A dream is a telegram from the hidden world...Only a fool or an illiterate person ignores it.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“I liked his voice, rich and unself-conscious even when he forgot words and hummed to fill in the gap. What I didn't understand, I imagined, and thus it became a love song.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“I closed my eyes and willed my breath to slow, my conscious mind to fold itself inward. I could feel heat pulsing from my daughter's head, her frantic thoughts whirling like broken glass. I loosened my hold on my body and dropped into that whirlpool.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“Rakhi likes the comfortable clutter of her life, the things she loves gathered around her like a shawl against the winterliness of the world.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it wa sthe same story they were speaking of.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“The dream comes heralding joy. I welcome the dream. The dream comes heralding sorrow. I welcome the dream. The dream is a mirror showing me my beauty. I bless the dream. The dream is a mirror showing me my ugliness. I bless the dream. My life is nothing but a dream From which I will wake into death,
which is nothing but a dream of life.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“She feels a certain pity when she thinks of that time, that self. Such an earnest wife-self, wanting so much, her stance one of perpetual leaning forward, as though perfection was a town just a little farther down the road. She didn’t know then that perfection had nothing to do with happiness.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“A line from a movie she once saw flits through her mind: Life gets in the way of art. That pretty much sums up my existence, she thinks.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“A line from a movie she once saw flits through her mind: Life gets in the way of art.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“I sogni sono telegrammi che vengono dal mondo dell'invisibile, - l'ho sentita dichiarare una volta. - Solo gli sciocchi - o gli analfabeti - lo ignorano”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“Each word she’d set down in the journals was a gift and a wound.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“But some things can’t be told that way, I know that now. They can only be approached stealthily, from behind, like wild birds. And even then they catch your scent and take flight before you throw your net of words over them.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“Watching them, I feel at once happy and lonely. It’s not the loneliness of being without a mate, but something more primal. As though I were the only being left on this side of the glass, while the rest of the world—happy, uncaring—lived out its life on the other side.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“Once I said to my mother, As long as there’s fresh bread in this world, things can’t be beyond repair.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“The dream is a mirror showing me my beauty. I bless the dream. The dream is a mirror showing me my ugliness. I bless the dream.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

“Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one that we have dreamed into being. We love people when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not static like cutouts; sooner or later they change shape, leading to misunderstanding, loneliness and loss of love.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams