Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.
BHARATI MUKHERJEEWe 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.
More Bharati Mukherjee Quotes
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What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?
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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 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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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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[On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.
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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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You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new person . . . What America offers me is romanticism and hope . . . Suddenly, I found myself in a country where
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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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In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.
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The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.
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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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Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.
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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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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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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.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE