Kamala Markandaya Quotes

“While the sun shines on you and the fields are green and beautiful to the eye, and your husband sees beauty in you which no has seen before, and you have a good store of grain laid away for hard times, a roof over you and a sweet stirring in your body, what more can a woman ask for?”

“For where shall a man turn who has no money? Where can he go? Wide, wide world, but as narrow as the coins in your hand. Like a tethered goat, so far and no farther. Only money can make the rope stretch, only money.”

″‘Would you hold me when my time is come? I am at peace. Do not grieve.’ ‘If I grieve,’ I said, ‘it is not for you, but for myself, beloved, for how shall I endure to live without you, who are my love and my life?‘”

“Privately I thought, Well, and what if we gave in to our troubles at every step! We would be pitiable creatures indeed to be so weak, for is not a man’s spirit given to him to rise above his misfortunes?”

“It is not enough to cry out, not sufficient to lay bare your woes and catalogue your needs; people have only to close their eyes and their ears, you cannot force them to see and to hear—or to answer your cries if they cannot and will not.”

″‘You are not alone,’ he said. ‘I live in my children...‘”

“The Gods have other things to do: they cannot attend to the pleas of every supplicant. ”

“Bend like the grass, that you do not break.”

“Want is our companion from birth to death, familiar as the seasons or the earth.”

“One must live.”