In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter.
BHARATI MUKHERJEEIn traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter.
More Bharati Mukherjee Quotes
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Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.
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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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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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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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What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?
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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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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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In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.
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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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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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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.
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[On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.
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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.
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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.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE