Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 31 quotes from The Palace of Illusions book by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni that I liked and saved while reading this book. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Quotes on Love
- Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you’re lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you’ll spend your life yearning for a man you can’t have. I advise you to forget about love, princess. Pleasure is simpler, and duty more important. Learn to be satisfied with them.
- Love. There’s no argument, no matter how strong, that can overcome that word.
- We cannot force ourselves to love – or to withhold it. At best, we can curb our actions. The heart itself is beyond control. That is its power, and its weakness.
Quotes on Time
- Time is the great eraser, both of sorrow and of joy.
- Dear one, time will teach you what you refuse to learn from your well-wishers.
Quotes on Truth
- Truth, like a diamond, has many facets.
- Truth, when it’s being lived, is less glamorous than our imaginings.
Other Quotes
- A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so. And often others see you as you see yourself.
- Destiny is strong and swift. You can’t trick it so easily. Even if you hadn’t come seeking it today, in time it would have found you. But in your case, your own nature is going to speed its process.
- Even the wisest don’t know what’s hidden in the depths of their being.
- Men might value fame above all things. But I’d rather be happy.
- Three dangerous moments will come to you. The first will be just before your wedding: at that time, hold back your question. The second will be when your husbands are at the height of their power: at that time, hold back your laughter. The third will be when you’re shamed as you’d never imagined possible: at that time, hold back your curse.
- A woman’s life is tougher than a banyan root, which exists without soil or water.
- Wait for a man to avenge your honor, and you’ll wait forever.
- We all have past lives. Highly evolved beings remember them, while lesser souls forget.
- The power of a man is like a bull’s charge, while the power of a woman moves aslant, like a serpent seeking its prey. Know the particular properties of your power. Unless you use it correctly, it won’t get you what you want.
- Don’t underestimate the power of prayer! It might well prevail where muscles failed!
- Isn’t that what our homes are ultimately, our fantasies made corporeal, our secret selves exposed? The converse is also true: we grow to become that which we live within.
- Expectations are like hidden rocks in your path – all they do is trip you up.
- It’s a rare man – and an even rarer ruler – that can remain untouched by jealousy in the face of a peer’s sudden prosperity.
- A situation in itself, is neither happy nor unhappy. It’s only your response to it that causes your sorrow.
- The humiliated enemy is the most dangerous one.
- Let the past go. Be at ease. Allow the future to arrive at its own pace, unfurling its secrets when it will.
- When you share a man’s pillow, his dreams seep into you.
- Just as we cast off worn clothes and wear new ones, when the time arrives, the soul casts off the body and finds a new one to work out its karma. Therefore the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.
- War is like an avalanche. Once begun, it cannot cease until it has wreaked all the destruction it is capable of.
- Wisdom that isn’t distilled in our own crucible can’t help us.
- Perhaps that is the miracle of stories. They make us realize that we’re not alone in our folly and our suffering.
- To see a loved one in pain is more wrenching than to bear that pain yourself.
- This is the nature of sorrow: often it fades with time, but once in a while it remains lodged below the surface of things, a stubborn thorn beneath a fingernail, making itself felt every time you brush against it.
- Sometimes one has to drop logic and go with the instinct of the heart, even if it contradicts law.