I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.
BHARATI MUKHERJEEIn the context of lost causes, Mother Teresa took on battles she knew she could win. Taken together, it seems to me, the criticisms of her work do not undermine or topple her overall achievement.
More Bharati Mukherjee Quotes
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The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.
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In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.
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I’m very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don’t really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It’s about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
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My first novel, ‘The Tiger’s Daughter,’ embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man’s land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.
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I’m sorry, this is too much work, I’m going to try applying for call center jobs. The pay is better.’
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I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money.
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There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn’t regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn’t conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.
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What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?
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I have to put down roots where I decide to stay. It wasn’t enough for me to be an expatriate Indian in Canada. If I can’t feel that I can make social, political and emotional commitments to a place, I have to find another place.
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But, Christ, there’s a difference between exotic and foreign, isn’t there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me.
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Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.
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My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it’s just continuous overload.
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Mother Teresas detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless.
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Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.
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The picture of Mother Teresa that I remember from my childhood is of a short, sari-wearing woman scurrying down a red gravel path between manicured lawns.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE