The Mistress Of Spices Quotes
"Yes, they all hold magic, even the everyday American spices you toss unthinking into your cooking pot."
"Here is one of them again: Vanilla beans soaked soft in goat’s milk and rubbed on the wristbone can guard against the evil eye."
"But the spices of true power are from my birthland, land of ardent poetry, aquamarine feathers. Sunset skies brilliant as blood."
"If you stand in the center of this room and turn slowly around, you will be looking at every Indian spice that ever was."
"I think I do not exaggerate when I say there is no other place in the world quite like this."
"The store has been here only for a year. But already many look at it and think it was always."
"I too am a reason why. I too look like I have been here forever."
"They do not know, of course. That I am not old, that this seeming-body I took on in Shampati’s fire when I vowed to become a Mistress is not mine."
"No. One more thing is mine. My name which is Tilo, short for Tilottama."
"Sometimes it fills me with a heaviness, lake of black ice, when I think that across the entire length of this land not one person knows who I am."
"You are not important. No Mistress is. What is important is the store. And the spices."
"And so it was that I grew proud and willful."
"And when I read this in their eyes I felt disdain, and a bile-black triumph that churned in my belly because I who had been last was now first."
"I will never forget them, this pain and this truth, I told myself. Never."
"Not for you to pick and choose your compassion. The ones who anger you most, you must bend most to help."
"Because inward even rich people are people only."
"Beneath the shiniest armor, gold-plated or diamond, the beat of the vulnerable flesh."
"All who come to my store on Saturday, I love them."
"We are all learning how love, like a rope of ground glass, can snake around your heart and pull you, bleeding, away from all you should."
"The hard husk of a grain removed, a seed moistened, turning soft."
"Ultimately the Mistresses are without power, hollow reeds only for the wind’s singing."
"The hopes and sorrows of humans slipping under my skin like a razor."
"When you chose the spices, you gave up that right."
"Your fate is born with you, stitched into your birth stars. Who can you blame for it?"
"Dreaming of love, don’t rouse the spices’ hate."
"Spices trust me, give me a chance. In spite of America, in spite of love, your Tilo will not let you down."
"The gleam that says We will change the world."
"Night draped in her glamor-scarf of stars often deceives—especially when we want something just so."
"The main spice in it is kalo marich, peppercorn."
"I know you do," I say. "Because I have them too. Every one of us."
"I Tilo who had always been the one who granted wishes, never the one who was wished for."
"How can one be disturbed by those one is happy to see."
"How I got to it," he says. "Ah. Another day I’ll tell you that story. Maybe."
"There’s just enough time for a stroll along the ocean before we return. If you want."
"How can you say that, Raven." My voice comes out tears.
"I’d feel a bitter satisfaction when she started in on me, quiet at first, then her voice getting louder."
"I’d go in the bathroom and look closely in the mirror. I’d run my fingers through my hair, which seemed coarser each day."
"Hatred of oneself which must surely be the worst hate of all."
"Her past was too deep in her, like a broken arrowhead."
"I was young then, and she was the adult, the one I’d always depended on."
"It’s been a long way from that narrow bathroom mirror to this ocean which lies open to the whole sky."
"What else can I expect from you, you no-good Indian."
"That power countered all of what my mother had pointed to with such distaste."
"My father was the real casualty in the silent war between me and my mother."
"I couldn’t feel a thing. Nothing. Here I was, holding my weeping, widowed mother."
"It’s when you hold someone whom you’d loved so much, and you feel—no, not hatred, even that’s something—you feel this vast coldness ballooning inside of you."
"The true risk is that I will somehow lose this love."
"I remember that afternoon like I’m looking at it. I came home from school and Mother had made brownies."
"I am a little afraid of this new country but at last I say Yes."
"The unseen sounds of the night, they are not unfamiliar to me."
"I couldn’t resist paying back the trick you played on me, you and baba both."
"I do not know if this letter will ever get to you."
"I am praying for you. O spices, o all the forces of the world, do not let her give up."
"I see my future distinct in the vial’s glow. What I cannot have. And I accept."
"Violence for violence. Sometimes that is the only way."
"And suddenly I know what I must do. And am glad of it, like a person on a night precipice who just before taking the last step sees, lightning-etched, the fatal edge."
"If regret wisps over my heart (O Raven) like a snatch of fog, I pay it no mind."
"She must wear it on the night of your nikah," I say, "for a lifetime of passionate loving."
"Yes, Ladyjaan. I have learned my foolishness."
"Raven!" I am laughing, remembering the bougainvillea girls. "Are you jealous?"
"The world does not work that way, foolish Mistress who thinks she can roll up the falling waterfall, can make the forest fire suck in its blaze-red tongue."
"Spices I am sorry, I say, standing at the water’s inky edge."
"Something must be destroyed. You tell us what."
"It is best for Haroun to live a life of love, not hate and hurting which brings only more of its kind."
"You who have more knowledge than me of loving, I ask you this: Do you, sleeping in your lover’s arms, dream his dreams?"
"This tenderness after desire is spent, what can be sweeter."
"Raven forgive me, I do not expect you to understand. Only to believe that I had no choice."
"But already their names are slipping from me, their faces, even this sadness of forgetting muted."
"The shop is a shell only. Whatever was in it giving heat and breath has long left."
"Spices, for their sake I will take on whatever burden you wish to lay on me."
"My heart is so full of sorrow I have to hold on to the railing just to keep standing."
"The only regret in my heart is for what Raven seeing me must feel."