Top 25 Anita Desai Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”

— Anita Desai

Featured in: Travel Quotes

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Isn’t it strange how life won’t flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?”

— Anita Desai

5. “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

6. “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

7. “The wheel turns and turns and turns: it never stops and stands still.”

— Anita Desai

8. “I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth.”

— Anita Desai

Featured in: Romance Quotes

9. “The bougainvillea hung about it, purple and magenta, in livid balloons.”

— Anita Desai

10. “Although it was shadowy and dark, Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies and did not extend to all equally.”

— Anita Desai

11. “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

12. “People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way.”

— Anita Desai

13. “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

14. “Now I understand why you do not wish to marry. You have dedicated your life to others – to your sick brother and your aged aunt and your little brother who will be dependent on you all his life. You have sacrificed your own life for them.”

— Anita Desai

15. “I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.”

— Anita Desai

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “That was the way life was: it lay so quiet, so still that you put your fingers out to touch it, to stroke it. Then it leapt up and struck you full in the face so that you spun about and spun about, gasping. The flames leapt up all around, rising by inches every minute, rising in rings.”

— Anita Desai

20. “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

21. “Greenness hangs, drips and sways from every branch and twig and frond in the surging luxuriance of July.”

— Anita Desai

22. “It seemed to her that the dullness and the boredom of her childhood, her youth, were stored here in the room under the worn dusty red rugs, in the bloated brassware, amongst the dried grasses in the swollen vases, behind the yellowed photographs in the oval frames-everything, everything that she had so hated as a child and that was still preserved here as if this were the storeroom of some dull, uninviting provincial museum.”

— Anita Desai

23. “At first she mistook them for sheets of pink crepe paper that someone had crumpled and carelessly flung down the hillside, perhaps after another astonishing party at the club. A moment later she remembered her great-grandmother’s words and saw that they were hosts of wild pink zephyranthes that had come up in the night after the first fall of rain.”

— Anita Desai

24. “There was no one to whom he could explain that in order to survive he needed to be at altitude, a Himalayan altitude, so he might breathe.”

— Anita Desai

25. “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

26. “Time is not a ladder one ascends into the future but a ladder one descends into the past.”

— Anita Desai

27. “Do you know anyone who would – secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self – really prefer to return to childhood?”

— Anita Desai

28. “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