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Kiran Desai QUOTES

Kiran Desai QUOTES

1 " You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway then they vanished again. Addresses, phone numbers did not hold. The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep anymore. "

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

2 " The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind. "

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

3 " Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them? "

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

4 " Sadness was so claustrophobic. "

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

5 " 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 , The Inheritance of Loss

6 " 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 , The Inheritance of Loss

7 " 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

8 " When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you. "

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

9 " When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of? "

― Kiran Desai

10 " 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 , The Inheritance of Loss

11 " Qu'est-ce qu'un pays sinon l'idée qu'on s'en fait ? "

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

12 " 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 , The Inheritance of Loss

13 " Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? "

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

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

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

15 " A journey once begun, has no end "

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

16 " 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 , The Inheritance of Loss

17 " Never again would he know love for a human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion. "

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

18 " 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 , The Inheritance of Loss

19 " The fact was that one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness... "

― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss

20 " You can catch more flies with honey than with sour milk "

― Kiran Desai , Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard