Top 100 Desai Quotes
#1. Manmohan Desai's cinema wasn't about logic. It was about exuberance, vitality and above all, entertainment.
Anupama Chopra
#2. Don't be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog. It's just rain.
Kiran Desai
#3. 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
#4. Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed.
Anita Desai
#5. You must live every moment of your life in such a way that if you had to live it over and over again till infinity, this would be a good thing.
Tanuja Desai Hidier
#6. In the early ages, I believe not much thought was given to what man is and what his real functions should be, and what is the real purpose of his life.
Morarji Desai
#7. Never again would he know love for a human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.
Kiran Desai
#8. But you have to realize, there is no such thing as this tidy little box you think you have to fold up and fit into; it simply does not exist. That's what I'm learning, learning as we speak.
Tanuja Desai Hidier
#9. Life at any time can become difficult: life at any time can become easy. It all depends upon how one adjusts oneself to life.
Morarji Desai
#10. 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
#11. One has got to choose between the two evils, also between the lesser of the two evils in the matter of food, and therefore vegetarian food has got to he taken by man in order to sustain human life.
Morarji Desai
#12. You can catch more flies with honey than with sour milk
Kiran Desai
#13. 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
#14. 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
#16. Not money, it's the service that makes you rich.
Rupali Desai
#17. What was a country but the idea of it?
Kiran Desai
#18. It is, therefore, a fact that anybody who wants to realise Truth or who wants to be humane, must follow non-violent ways of life, otherwise he will not be able to reach the Truth.
Morarji Desai
#20. India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country.
Anita Desai
#21. Say goodbye to this energy of fear that kept you safe but small.
Panache Desai
#22. My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.
Anita Desai
#23. When I am writing, I focus one hundred percent on my writing. Then, by the time I'm half way through the book, I'm already thinking about the ending.
Anita Desai
#24. Not only the footwear, wear also the courtesy, respect, and gratitude in your heart while stepping out of home.
Rupali Desai
#26. The wheel turns and turns and turns: it never stops and stands still.
Anita Desai
#27. The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.
Kiran Desai
#28. 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
#29. Politics and friendships are like oil and water, you need a really good blender to make them work.
Kush Desai
#30. I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.
Kiran Desai
#31. The publishing world is very timid. Readers are much braver.
Kiran Desai
#32. I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth.
Anita Desai
#33. I would, therefore, say that for no reason whatsoever, except in self-defence, should one think of killing any animal.
Morarji Desai
#34. They never looked at anyone else, only at each other, with an expression that halted me. It was tender, loving, yes, but in an inhuman way, so intense. Divine, I felt. Or insane.
Anita Desai
#35. 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
#36. If there is one thing I would want you to take away from this book, it's the knowledge that you have the power to change your belief system. With the right beliefs, nothing is impossible to achieve. Therefore, if there is one thing you wish to change in yourself, start working on your beliefs. IN
Kulin Desai
#37. And it now occurred to me that maybe the whole point was, in fact, to lose yourself. But not in the sense of confusion
in the sense of connection to something bigger than yourself ... Getting lost to be found.
Tanuja Desai Hidier
#38. They say in the east you love the person you marry and in the west you marry the person you love. But maybe it's a lot simpler than that. Maybe you just love the person you love.
Tanuja Desai Hidier
#39. Things we carry from home shows where we hail from ~ courtesy, respect, and gratitude
Rupali Desai
#40. Why couldn't she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else's life.
Kiran Desai
#41. When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process.
Anita Desai
#42. For those who believe in God the matter is simpler still and clearly than anything else: because those who believe in God believe that God is the Creator of the whole Universe and there is nothing that does not come from Him.
Morarji Desai
#43. Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.
Anita Desai
#44. You being you is the blessing. You being you is the miracle. You being you is enough. You being you is your soul signature.
Panache Desai
#45. The cow was not an Indian cow; therefore it was not holy?
Kiran Desai
#46. From this it follows that con-sideration for other persons or for other living beings is very vital for goodness and want of consideration for other people makes human beings selfish, regardless for other people's good.
Morarji Desai
#47. I do not want to go into its physical reasons: the construction of the human body is different from that of carnivorous animals. But man's intelligence is such that it can be utilised to defend any-thing he does, whether right or wrong.
Morarji Desai
#48. What a sense of possession, of confidence, it gave one to have pockets, to shove one's fists into them, as if in simply owning pockets one owned riches, owned independence.
Anita Desai
#49. Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them?
Kiran Desai
#50. Life's experiences, regardless of how they show up, are the means through which we get to love one another
Panache Desai
#51. We think of immigration as a Western issue but, of course, it isn't.
Kiran Desai
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Ever since I could first write I have been doing so. When I was taught how to write and read at school, I made up my mind that this was what I love to do best and this was the world I was going to occupy.
Anita Desai
#55. Do you know anyone who would - secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self - really prefer to return to childhood?
Anita Desai
#56. I do not say that one who is vegetarian is full of compassion and one who is not, is otherwise. We sometimes find people, who are vegetarians, are very bad people.
Morarji Desai
#57. Fame must be received with gratitude and handled with humility.
Rupali Desai
#58. Quick, nervy and jumpy -yet to the children she was as constant as a staff, a tree that can be counted on not to pull up its root and shift in the night. She was the tree that grew in the centre of their lives and in whose shade they lived.
Anita Desai
#59. We need to find our courage, which, of course, is not the absence of fear but rather the willingness to feel the fear and move forward anyway. Fear isn't going to kill us. It's an energy that we can allow to move through us.
Panache Desai
#60. 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
#61. Your sadness doesn't make you less of a human being. In fact, it makes you more. More expansive. More connected. Painfully beautiful. Raw. Open. Completely alive.
Panache Desai
#62. I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India.
Kiran Desai
#63. Self-help must precede help from others. Even for making certain of help from heaven, one has to help oneself.
Morarji Desai
#64. Could fulfillment be felt as deeply as loss.
Kiran Desai
#65. The lighter we are - the more we've dealt with everything inside us - the more we are able to bring into our lives abundance, health, love, and soulfulness.
Panache Desai
#66. 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
#67. Reality is merely one-tenth visible section of the iceberg that one sees above the surface of the ocean - art remaining nine-tenths of it that lies below the surface. That is why it is more near Truth than Reality itself. Art does not merely reflect Reality - it enlarges it.
Anita Desai
#68. The Indian diaspora is a wonderful place to write from, and I am lucky to be part of it.
Kiran Desai
#69. 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
#70. The room rang with her voice, then with silence. In the shaded darkness, silence had the quality of a looming dragon. It seemed to roar and the roar to reverberate, to dominate. To escape from it would require a burst of recklessness, even cruelty.
Anita Desai
#71. I believe in preventing cruelty to all living beings in any form.
Morarji Desai
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. The vegetarian movement is an ancient movement and is not quite a modern one.
Morarji Desai
#75. Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.
Anita Desai
#76. One can't be kind to one person and cruel to another.
Morarji Desai
#77. 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
#78. She was right. After all, if she herself had wondered whether she was Indian enough
she, who had always been to me a sort of epitome of Indian
then who could be? Who could claim the sole right or way to an identity?
Tanuja Desai Hidier
#79. Greenness hangs, drips and sways from every branch and twig and frond in the surging luxuriance of July.
Anita Desai
#80. 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
#81. If we do not want to be pained by anybody we must not pain anybody; and how can man consider himself humane if he wants to live at the cost of others.
Morarji Desai
#82. The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.
Anita Desai
#83. 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
#84. Our inner monologues have tremendous power over us. They can affect not only our mood, not only our physical bodies,
Panache Desai
#85. When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you.
Kiran Desai
#86. Therefore, vegetarianism alone can give us the quality of com-passion, which distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world.
Morarji Desai
#87. Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better.
Anita Desai
#88. Society at present suffers far more from waste of money than from want of it. There is dignity in every attempt to economise. It indicates self-denial and imparts strength of character. It produces a well-regulated mind.
Morarji Desai
#89. 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
#90. The moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being.
Anita Desai
#91. Nonviolence presupposes a level of humanness--however low it may be, in every human being.
Narayan Desai
#92. 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
#93. I feel as comfortable anywhere as I feel uncomfortable anywhere.
Kiran Desai
#94. I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.
Kiran Desai
#95. Be everything with so much love in your heart that you would never want to do it any other way.
Amrit Desai
#96. An expert gives an objective view. He gives his own view.
Morarji Desai
#97. A talent or a thing that is a bit more than ordinary in someone should be appreciable - regardless of personal liking, opinion, or boundaries of judgment.
Rupali Desai
#98. 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
#99. Writing, for me, means humility. It's a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you're writing honestly.
Kiran Desai
#100. No one, not all the armies of the world, can stop an idea whose time has come.
Rudrajeet Desai
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