“I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable--but I always was so, only I never knew it!”

“May your heart be mine, may my heart be yours. May your sorrows be mine, may my joys be yours.”

“Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on t...”

“The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you.”

“Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the hear...”

“I want to weep too, not for me but for us all--for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.”

“Children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people.”

“But marrying within one's own family can get monotonous. One has heard all the same family stories, knows all the jokes and all the same recipes. No novelty.”

“She took comfort in the familiarity of his smell, knowing that if she lost all her possessions and her home, at least she would have her family.”

“To know India and her peoples, one has to know the monsoon. one has to know the monsoon. It is not enough to read about it in books, or see it on the cinema screen, or hear someone talk about it. I...”

“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle th...”

“Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage about what wed do,...”

“Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a mans done and you want him to be a hero at the same time!”

“There comes a hush between darkness and day.Like expectation of a caress.A murmur of silence. Tree crests peeked down at Paulette through slowly lifting fog. Bark felt around for its texture again....”

“Underneath the groundyou can't hear a soundnot even the sweet falling rainyou might forget about tomorrowforget about the swallowsbut they won't forget youthey won't forget you”