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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

I’m sorry, this is too much work, I’m going to try applying for call center jobs. The pay is better.’

Bharati Mukherjee

Related Topics

BetterPaySorryWork

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More Bharati Mukherjee Quotes

• 

  I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship.

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• 

  Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.

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• 

  A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.

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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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• 

  Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

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• 

  Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

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  GrowingRunningSchoolUp
• 

  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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• 

  I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta:

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• 

  In 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.

  BHARATI MUKHERJEE
  BattlesCriticismsMotherOverallToppel
• 

  What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

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  ChildrenMindPoetry
• 

  What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?

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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.

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• 

  In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter.

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  DaughterFatherMother
• 

  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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• 

  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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  CoupleGrowingNotebookUp
• 

  We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It’s a question of time, not motive.

  BHARATI MUKHERJEE
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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.

  BHARATI MUKHERJEE
  BookFictionWhite
• 

  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.

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  CaptivityFourYears
• 

  I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.

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  DifferentFiltersLight
• 

  In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.

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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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• 

  She would have in tow one or two slower-footed, sari-clad young Indian nuns. We thought her a freak. Probably wed picked up on unvoiced opinions of our Loreto nuns.

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• 

  The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.

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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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• 

  [On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.

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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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• 

  You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wanted… I needed pencils for school, I needed a notebook, they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded.

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  MomentNeededSchoolTaking