Kiran Desai Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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
The Indian diaspora is a wonderful place to write from and I am lucky to be part of it.

Kiran Desai
I feel as comfortable anywhere as I feel uncomfortable anywhere

Kiran Desai
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
Jemu watched his father disappear. He didn't throw the coconut and he didn't cry. Never again would he know love for another human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.

Kiran Desai
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
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
The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.

Kiran Desai
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
Why couldn't she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else's life.

Kiran Desai
I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India.

Kiran Desai
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
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
I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

Kiran Desai
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
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
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