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.
BHARATI MUKHERJEEI 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:
More Bharati Mukherjee Quotes
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Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE -
I’m sorry, this is too much work, I’m going to try applying for call center jobs. The pay is better.’
BHARATI MUKHERJEE -
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 -
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 -
What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?
BHARATI MUKHERJEE -
Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE -
Mother Teresas detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE -
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 -
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 -
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.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE -
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 -
What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?
BHARATI MUKHERJEE -
A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.
BHARATI MUKHERJEE -
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 -
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