Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery Quotes

“Choosing freedom over toxic familiarity would always be the correct choice.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“I could live without chemistry but not without kindness.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“By writing what I was grateful for, I learned to look for things that made me smile.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“The path of least resistance led to hibernation.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Growing up is never easy. We think it happens when you reach a certain age, accomplish a goal, acquire a house, or reach a milestone, but it doesn’t stop.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“I decided to create a home from scratch, something that would reflect my tastes and preferences with a combination of objects and energy that would add up to a safe and inviting space for the people and experiences I wanted to welcome into my life.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“That first choice to leave an unhappy home had put me on a path strewn with more choices. Such was life. I had to accept it without looking for certainties.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Lighting the lamp is an art. A ritual. A discipline. Lighting the lamp became my anchor, and my focus, a deliberate act, and a resolution.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Nothing was permanent, even discontentment.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Nourishment comes in many forms. So does happiness.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“For all my talk of emancipation, I had fallen into the trap of caring deeply about “what will people say,” having internalized the cultural taboo of divorce.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“The worst thing about your life falling apart is that the world takes no notice.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“It felt important to acknowledge our small successes, to stop and observe the tiny pockets of sunshine that broke up the boredom of our monochrome days and made us smile.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“What do you do when you know that staying together is not easy and breaking up is even more difficult?”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“It wasn’t that difficult to cook. Or to eat well. The key was to do it with love, for myself and for my family.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“The thing about marriages, bad ones especially, is the utter disregard with which the couple and those around them treat the cracks when they first emerge. Like tectonic plates that crush and grind against each other under the surface of the earth, the damage does not happen on one sunny morning when the earthquake hits. When a couple splits, it is the result of an inevitable break that has been brewing for years without respite.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Everything you do does not need to have a practical use; it’s important to make space for beauty.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“It took more than motherhood to move me toward meditation. I first had to lose things—my mother, my marriage, my cynicism. I had to make life-changing decisions. Yet I moved, step by step, into the unknown inner world. Hesitatingly. Skeptically. Slowly.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Changing my narrative from one of complaint and dissatisfaction to a more positive one changed my mood, but it didn’t change all the other negatives that had tipped the balance of our marital life into dysfunction. Memories of good times were a reminder that life cannot be measured in purely black and white terms. The good and bad coexist in a tenuous equilibrium that is always in flux.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“There is change, and there is transformation.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“The image of woman as mother is universal, not specific to any culture. But in India, that image is elevated to iconic status by a society that puts marriage and motherhood at the core of a woman’s existence.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Who knows what goes on in a marriage? Even my parents, who had a compatible marriage, had their points of contention. They had figured out how to disagree and how to find common ground.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Instead of assembling the shattered pieces of my outer existence and inner reality into an incomprehensible structure, I learned to consciously create a new life.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Sometimes, wishes come true in strange ways.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“All I could do was what I had done each morning for all these years. Light my lamp. Every Single. Day.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“From measuring my life in terms of milestones, I now tried to measure it in moments—those small pockets of time that float with great radiance even though they are embedded in the minutiae of life.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“The longer you perform a ritual, the more power it garners - from the act, from the faith, from the feeling.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“My writing time had been my personal oasis. A small respite each night, a private space to muse and vent. It was a restorative act, not a performative one.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“An empty room can be an instrument for introspection. It was a reflection of the void created by the decision to distance myself from a relationship that had defined me to others and to myself. If I was not a wife, who was I? I was removing a label that marked my place in a social system, but was I still “me” without that label?”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“To gain confidence, to put myself firmly on a path to independence, I needed to practice making small choices. I decided to begin by making this cavernous house into a cozy home.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery