62 Quotes by 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?

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?

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.

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

I feel as comfortable anywhere as I feel uncomfortable anywhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.