Top 50 Kiran Desai Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”

— Kiran Desai

2. “A journey once begun, has no end.”

— Kiran Desai

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

— Kiran Desai

4. “No fruit dies so vile and offensive a death as the banana...”

— Kiran Desai

5. “Sadness was so claustrophobic.”

— Kiran Desai

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?”

— Kiran Desai

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor. I read a lot of American writers.”

— Kiran Desai

15. “I feel as comfortable anywhere as I feel uncomfortable anywhere.”

— Kiran Desai

16. “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

17. “Writing, for me, means humility. It’s a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you’re writing honestly.”

— Kiran Desai

18. “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

19. “I don’t think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.”

— Kiran Desai

20. “Why couldn’t she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else’s life.”

— Kiran Desai

21. “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

22. “I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India.”

— Kiran Desai

23. “We think of immigration as a Western issue but, of course, it isn’t.”

— Kiran Desai

24. “The publishing world is very timid. Readers are much braver.”

— Kiran Desai

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with the kind of luminous light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent. All you needed to do was to reach out and pluck it.”

— Kiran Desai

30. “When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you.”

— Kiran Desai

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “That very afternoon the police arrived at Cho Oyu in a line of toad-colored jeeps that appeared through the moving static of a small anxious sleet. They left their opened umbrellas in a row on the veranda, but the wind undid them and they began to wheel about – mostly black ones that leaked a black dye, but also a pink, synthetic made-in-Taiwan one, abloom with flowers.”

— Kiran Desai

35. “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

36. “Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them?”

— Kiran Desai

37. “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

38. “The cow was not an Indian cow; therefore it was not holy?”

— Kiran Desai

39. “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

40. “What was a country but the idea of it?”

— Kiran Desai

41. “The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow.”

— Kiran Desai

42. “When they would finally attempt to rise from those indolent afternoons they spent together, Gyan and Sai would have melted into each other like pats of butter – how difficult it was to cool and compose themselves back into their individual beings.”

— Kiran Desai

43. “Looking a dead insect in the sack of basmati that had come all the way from Dehra Dun, he almost wept with sorrow and marvel at its journey, which was tenderness for his own journey. In India almost nobody would be able to afford this rice, and you had to travel around the world to be able to eat such things where they were cheap enough that you could gobble them down without being rich; and when you got home to the place where they grew, you couldn’t afford them anymore.”

— Kiran Desai

44. “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

45. “Year by year, his life wasn’t amounting to anything at all... And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his self-pity – oh, the tediousness of it... Shouldn’t he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.”

— Kiran Desai

46. “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.”

— Kiran Desai

47. “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

48. “How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people’s countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his own did to him?”

— Kiran Desai

49. “Jemubhai looked at his father, a barely educated man venturing where he should not be, and the love in Jemubhai’s heart mingled with pity, the pity with shame.”

— Kiran Desai

50. “The men sat unbedding their rage, learning, as everyone does in this country, at one time or another, that old hatreds are endlessly retrievable.”

— Kiran Desai