Top 46 Kiran Desai Quotes
#1. Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.
Kiran Desai
#2. A man wasn't equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm. "We should be dying." the judge almost wept.
Kiran Desai
#3. When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.
Kiran Desai
#4. The Indian diaspora is a wonderful place to write from, and I am lucky to be part of it.
Kiran Desai
#5. She'd have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she'd be trapped forever in a place whose times had already passed.
Kiran Desai
#6. In India, if you are from the elite, dogs are extremely important. The breed of the dog indicates your wealth, that you are westernized. The cook, another human being, is on a much lower level than your dog. You see this all the time.
Kiran Desai
#7. Could fulfillment be felt as deeply as loss.
Kiran Desai
#8. I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India.
Kiran Desai
#9. Slowly, painstakingly, like ants, men would make their paths and civilization and their wars once again, only to have it wash away again.
Kiran Desai
#10. I'm always in the kitchen, cooking and experimenting - I love it. And every now and then I think, 'I should write a cookbook' or, 'I should write for food magazines.' And then I get drawn back to writing fiction again.
Kiran Desai
#11. Writing, for me, means humility. It's a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you're writing honestly.
Kiran Desai
#12. it was just fate in the way fate has of providing the destitute with a greater quota of accidents for which nobody can be blamed.
Kiran Desai
#13. I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.
Kiran Desai
#14. I feel as comfortable anywhere as I feel uncomfortable anywhere.
Kiran Desai
#15. But then, how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn't believe in anything exactly? How did you embrace what was yours if you didn't leave something for it? How did you create a life of meaning and pride?
Kiran Desai
#16. This was how history moved, the slow build, the quick burn, and in an incoherence, the leaping both backward and forward, swallowing the young into old hate.
Kiran Desai
#17. When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you.
Kiran Desai
#18. But the child shouldn't be blamed for the father's crime, she tried to reason with herself, then. But should the child therefore also enjoy the father's illicit gain?
Kiran Desai
#19. Perhaps that's why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place : the self consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distance and kept the heart intact.
Kiran Desai
#20. He tried to keep on the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn't tell which one of his selves was the authentic, if any.
Kiran Desai
#21. Why couldn't she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else's life.
Kiran Desai
#23. What was a country but the idea of it?
Kiran Desai
#25. She had been mistaken - she was only the center to herself, as always, and a small player playing her part in someone else's story.
Kiran Desai
#26. It was a terrible thing to be awake while some people flew, carrying the world over his head, and others slept, claiming it from under his feet.
Kiran Desai
#27. You can catch more flies with honey than with sour milk
Kiran Desai
#28. His lines had been honed over centuries, passed down through generations, for poor people needed certain lines; the script was always the same, and they had no option but to beg for mercy.
Kiran Desai
#29. Never again would he know love for a human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.
Kiran Desai
#30. Don't be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog. It's just rain.
Kiran Desai
#31. He seemed unaware of what was going on, stared out without hope or ambition, without worry, developing a quality devoid of qualities to get him through this life.
Kiran Desai
#32. We think of immigration as a Western issue but, of course, it isn't.
Kiran Desai
#33. Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them?
Kiran Desai
#34. The cow was not an Indian cow; therefore it was not holy?
Kiran Desai
#35. The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.
Kiran Desai
#36. The Himalayas rose layer upon layer until those gleaming peaks proved a man to be so small that it made sense to give it all up, empty it all out.
Kiran Desai
#37. The publishing world is very timid. Readers are much braver.
Kiran Desai
#38. I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.
Kiran Desai
#39. If you write a lovely story about India, you're criticized for selling an exotic version of India. And if you write critically about India, you're seen as portraying it in a negative light - it also seems to be a popular way to present India, sort of mangoes and beggars.
Kiran Desai
#40. When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.
Kiran Desai
#41. New York is a lovely city. It is an easy city to go back to and an easy city to leave. Every time I go there I immediately make travel plans.
Kiran Desai
#42. This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise.
Kiran Desai
#43. Now here was Saeed Saeed, and Biju's admiration for the man confounded him. Fate worked this way. Biju was overcome by the desire to be his friend, because Saeed Saeed wasn't drowning, he was bobbing in the tides.
Kiran Desai
#44. All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.
Kiran Desai
#45. Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.
Kiran Desai
#46. No fruit dies so vile and offensive a death as the banana ...
Kiran Desai
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