Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

From time to time, I'll look back through the personal journals I've scribbled in throughout my life, the keepers of my raw thoughts and emotions. The words poured forth after my dad died, when I went through a divorce, and after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There are so many what-ifs scribbled on those pages.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I don't know who will overcome losses, some losses aren't meant to be overcome, but all losses make for good stories and good character development and all the jazz that makes a show compelling and watchable.

My dad died when I was 14. It was very sudden, traumatic, and confusing. I always felt I could have gone down a bad road at that point, but I made a choice to be a winner.

Losing my mother at such an early age is the scar of my soul. But I feel like it ultimately made me into the person I am today; I understand the journey of life. I had to go through what I did to be here.

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope

Grief dares us to love once more.

Now I am setting out into the unknown. It will take me a long while to work through the grief. There are no shortcuts; it has to be gone through.

My worst year. The only thing that I know for a fact now is that if it's really a bad day, then I draw the curtains, and I lay in bed. There is no way of dealing with grief. And I have no idea. This year I had double of them, my mother and my husband. I just take it one day at a time.

and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended

The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is tha life actually goes on.

I think everyone understands grief, the journey it takes us on, whether it's the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a disappointment. Some people don't deal with it, the power of it. Some do. Some feel the weight of it and it informs their choices. I've had to open up to grief in different contexts.

I've been through cancer, divorce, loss and bereavement, but they are things most humans go through.

As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.

Most people are remarkably resilient. Even those who have been through war or great loss often find reservoirs of strength. But the legacy of trauma is a heavy burden to bear.

It's important to wallow and grieve when you have a health issue. I don't think you really get the best stuff out of life until you've had the worst stuff.

Losing my parents, who I admired, loved and needed, it took a long time to be able to move on.

I have had to really grapple with the fact that, while I wish things could be different at times, I ultimately needed to experience the transformation that comes with pain and loss and sorrow.

On top of trying to find my way in this business and losing my mother and trying to figure out what family meant to me and everything - 2016, there was a lot of anger from me and a lot of anger all around. I think the hardest part was to really realize that all these things, it's worth it.

My entire tenth grade year, my dad was in a coma. That changes a person. It changes a kid. It makes you ridiculously independent.

Pain is one of the unavoidable facts of life. We Bidens have had our share. We don't pretend otherwise. And we don't pretend that we are different from families all over America that have to face the loss of loved ones or have to deal with the fallout of divorces.

Loss is the hardest thing, I said. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore.

It's hard to make progress with grief.

It's like my garden, love. Everything grows. Including love. And with that growing everyday how can you expect missing her to ever fade away? Everything builds, including our ability to cope with it. That's how we keep going.

Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.