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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
![Bharati Mukherjee Quote - [On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/on-her-writing-agenda-make-the-familiar-exotic-the.jpg)
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![Bharati Mukherjee Quote - [On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/blue-on-her-writing-agenda-make-the-familiar-.jpg)
![Bharati Mukherjee Quote - [On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/red-on-her-writing-agenda-make-the-familiar-.jpg)
![Bharati Mukherjee Quote - [On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/brown-on-her-writing-agenda-make-the-familiar-.jpg)
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