Anita Desai Quotes & Sayings

The moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being. — Anita Desai

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

I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth. — Anita Desai

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

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

The wheel turns and turns and turns: it never stops and stands still. — Anita Desai

Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better. — Anita Desai

...People stop, stare. No one stop and stare if one of your own beggars drop dead in street. No just step over him like he is a stone, or a dog turd and go away quickly. But when they see a white man with golden hair lying on the street, everyone stop, everyone cry, "Hai - hai, - poor boy, call doctor, call ambulance. What has happen, Farrokh-bhai?"..."

- Farrokh said to Baumgartner when he wanted to get rid of the reluctant, overly drugged homeless foreigner out of his restaurant. (Page 167) — Anita Desai

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

They never looked at anyone else, only at each other, with an expression that halted me. It was tender, loving, yes, but in an inhuman way, so intense. Divine, I felt. Or insane. — Anita Desai

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

I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges. — Anita Desai

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greenness hangs, drips and sways from every branch and twig and frond in the surging luxuriance of July. — Anita Desai

Only their efforts to make him talk failed. he would say one word at a time, if pressed, but seemed happier not to and could not be made to repeat a whole line. Gradually, as his family learnt how to anticipate his few needs and how to respond, they ceased to notice his silence -his manner of communication seemed full and rich enough to them: he no more needed to converse than Aunt Mira's cat did. — Anita Desai

Do you know anyone who would - secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self - really prefer to return to childhood? — Anita Desai

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

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

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

People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way. — Anita Desai

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

Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow. — Anita Desai

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