Bharati Mukherjee Quotes

21 quotes in 531 categories

• In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did,…
• In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood…
• 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…
• What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?
• I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You…
• The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.
• I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver…
• Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a…
• I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• One of the early tip-offs to me about the enormous changes that were going on with being in a Bangalore house, home, where the young…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.
• 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.
• I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me.
• I thought of America as Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner sprawled on the edge of a Hollywood swimming pool biting into the same red apple.

Browse Bharati Mukherjee Quotes by Category