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

Bharati Mukherjee

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.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE

Commitment Emotional Roots
A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE

Farmers Farming Modesty
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

Definitions Littles Madness
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.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE

Different Filters Light
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.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE

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

Fiction Mainstream Reader
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

Childhood Mother Two
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

Book Fiction White
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:
BHARATI MUKHERJEE

Father Home Writing
I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE

Couple Growing Notebook Up
I’m sorry, this is too much work, I’m going to try applying for call center jobs. The pay is better.’
BHARATI MUKHERJEE

Better Pay Sorry Work
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.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE

Country Daughter Mother
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 MUKHERJEE

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

Daughter Father Mother
What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?
BHARATI MUKHERJEE

Children Mind Poetry
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

Motive Time

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

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

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Popular Authors

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