The Mistress Of Spices Quotes

Each day has a color, a smell.

Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.

How can I forgive if you are not ready to give up that which caused you to stumble?

Fenugreek, Tuesday's spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain.

Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. . . . Fennel . . . smelling of changes to come.

Monday is the day of silence, day of the whole white mung bean, which is sacred to the moon.

Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.

...don't create snakes out of ropes. You have enough to worry about.

Hope not built on reason brings disappointment only.

She lifts a bowl of kheer and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.

Each desire in the world is different, as is each love.

The mark of a wise man is that he changes his mind when he sees mistake.

Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as reality, an objective and untouched nature of being. Or if all that we encounter has already been changed by what we had imagined it to be. If we have dreamed it into being.

Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved.

An Army wife is probably the only woman in the world who knows and readily accepts that she is the mistress, because, let’s face it, the Army is the wife and the wife gets all the damn attention!

When you begin to weave your own desires into your vision, the true seeing is taken from you.

When your heart is crusted over with your own pain, it is easy to feel little for others.

Open yourself to the sight, and it will show you what you need to know. But never attempt to bend it to your will. Never pry into a particular life that has been brought to your care. That is to break trust.

O exhilaration, I thought. To be lifted up through the eye of chaos, to balance breath-stopped on the edge of nothing. And the plunge that would follow, the shattering of my matchstick body to smithereens, the bones flying free as foam, the heart finally released.

In your yearning you have made me into that which I am not.

Who held his cries in until red swam behind his eyelids like bleeding stars.

I am turmeric who rose out of the ocean of milk when the devas and asuras churned for the treasures of the universe. I am turmeric who came after the nectar and before the poison and thus lie in between.

O the irony of desire, always hearkening after the liquid glimmer beyond the distant-most dune. Sometimes only to find that it is no different from the parched sand on which we stood days, months, years ago, in yearning.

Maybe it was that sense that comes to us all at some point in the growing-up process, that we are separate from our parents and must suffer our own lives, with our own sorrows. Or maybe it was something simpler, a childish spite, Let her hurt like I’m hurting. And then the light changed and she started driving again.

til which fried in its own oil restores lustre when one has lost interest in life. I will be Tilottama, the essence of til, life-giver, restorer of health and hope.

Pain, which is ultimately only like itself.

And under it all, earth waited with her lead-filled veins, impatient to shrug herself clean.

My heart is filled with passion for the spices, my ears with the music of our dance together. My blood with our shared power. I need no pitiful mortal man to love. I believe this. Wholly.

Most of all we learned to feel without words the sorrows of our sisters, and without words to console them. In this way our lives were not so different from those of the girls we had left behind in our home villages

You are thinking, what does it look like, such a knife. Most ordinary, for that is the nature of deepest magic. Deepest magic which lies at the heart of our everyday lives, flickering fire, if only we had eyes to see.

We had known it would be hard to leave this island of women where on our skin the warm rain fell like pomegranate seeds, where we woke to birdcall and slept to the First Mother’s singing, where we swam naked without shame in lakes of blue lotus. To exchange it for the human world whose harshness we remembered. But this?

Spices why must you always compare. Each desire in the world is different, as is each love. You who were born in the world’s dawning know this far better than I. Answer. Weigh it yourself: To him I will give one night, to you the rest of my life, whatever you choose it to be, one hundred years on the island or a single moment, conflagration and consuming, in Shampati’s fire.

Spices why must you always compare. Each desire in the world is different, as is each love. You who were born in the world’s dawning know this far better than I. Answer. Weigh it yourself: To him I will give one night, to you the rest of my life, whatever you choose it to be, one hundred years on the island or a single moment, conflagration and consuming, in Shampati’s fire. As

For the first time I admit I am giving myself to love. Not the worship I offered the Old One, not the awe I felt for the spices. But human love, all tangled up, at once giving and demanding and pouting and ardent. It frightens me, the risk of it. And I see that the risk lies not in what I always feared, the anger of the spices, their desertion. The true risk is that I will somehow lose this love.

I had a dog once. I thought so much of him that when he died I couldn't bear the thought of getting another in his place. He was a FRIEND—you understand, Mistress Blythe? Matey's only a pal. I'm fond of Matey—all the fonder on account of the spice of devilment that's in him—like there is in all cats. But I LOVED my dog. I always had a sneaking sympathy for Alexander Elliott about HIS dog. There isn't any devil in a good dog. That's why they're more lovable than cats, I reckon.

A volte mi chiedo se la realtà esiste davvero, se c'è varamente una natura delle cose, obiettiva e intatta. O se tutto ciò che ci accade è già modificato in anticipo dalla nostra immaginazione. Se sognando qualcosa gli diamo vita.

Yes my Lalita, coming at last into your own, I am praying for you. O spices, o all the forces of the world, do not let her give up. Daughter, the birth passage is always narrow, suffocating. But that first free gulp of air filling the lungs, ah. I pray it for you.

Tilo my daughter,” said the Old One, and by her face I knew she felt my struggle in her own heart, “most gifted most troublesome most loved, Tilo traveling to America eager as an arrow, I have here something for you.” And from the folds of her clothing she removed it and placed it on my tongue, a slice of gingerroot, wild island ada to give my heart steadfastness, to keep me strong in my vows.

American I too am looking. I thought all my looking was done when I found the spices but then I saw you and now I no longer know. I want to tell him this. I want to believe he’ll understand. In my head an echo like a song of stone. A Mistress must carve her own wanting out of her chest, must fill the hollow left behind with the needs of those she serves.

now I sometimes wonder if it might not have been the most worthwhile of the skills I learned on the island.

My fault my fault. A refrain so many women the world over have been taught to sing.

Later I would ask, “Why did you save me, why?” The serpents never answered. What answer is there for love.

Is it ever possible for two people, no matter how deep the love, to explain our lives each to the other? To tell our motives? Is it even worth to try?

My fault my fault. A refrain so many women the world over have been taught to sing. ‘Why do you say that, beti?