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

Anita Desai Quotes

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

— Anita Desai
About Stories

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

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

— 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

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

— Anita Desai
Romance

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

The wheel turns and turns and turns: it never stops and stands still.

— 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

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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Anita Desai
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