Quotes from The Inheritance of Loss

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of 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.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“Why couldn't she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else's life.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“A journey once begun, has no end”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“Never again would he know love for a human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway then they vanished again. Addresses, phone numbers did not hold. The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep anymore.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“Could fulfillment be felt as deeply as loss.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“What is this all about,' asked Sai, but her mouth couldn't address her ear in the tumult; her mind couldn't talk to her heart. 'Shame on myself,' she said...Who was she...she with her self-importance, her demand for happiness, yelling it at fate, at the deaf heavens, screaming for her joy to be brought forth..?

How dare...How dare you not...

Why shouldn't I have...How dare...I deserve...Her small greedy soul...Her tantrums and fits...Her mean tears...Her crying, enough for all the sadness in the world, was only for herself. Life wasn't single in its purpose...or even its direction...The simplicity of what she'd been taught wouldn't hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny happiness and live safely within it.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“He wasn't a bad person. He didn't want to fight. The trouble was that he'd tried to be part of the larger questions, tried to become part of politics and history. Happiness had a smaller location, though this wasn't something to flaunt, of course; very few would stand up and announce, 'Actually, I'm a coward,' but his timidity might be disguised, well, in a perfectly ordinary existence situated between meek contours...Cowardice needed its facade, its reasoning, like anything else if it was to be his life's principle. Contentment is no easy matter. One had to situate it cannily, camoflauge it, pretend it was something else.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by journey. Ohio was the first place he loved, for there at last he had been able to acquire poise --”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“Don't be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog. It's just rain.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“Biju stepped out of the airport into the Calcutta night, warm, mammalian. His feet sank into dust winnowed to softness at his feet, ad he felt an unbearable feeling, sad and tender, old and sweet like the memory of falling asleep, a baby on his mother's lap. Thousands of people were out though it was almost eleven. He saw a pair of elegant bearded goats in a rickshaw, riding to slaughter. A conference of old men with elegant goat faces, smoking bidis. A mosque and minarets lit magic green in the night with a group of women rushing by in burkas, bangles clinking under the black and a big psychedelic mess of colour from a sweet shop. Rotis flew through the air as in a juggling act, polka-dotting the sky high over a restaurant that bore the slogan "Good food makes good mood". Biju stood there in that dusty tepid soft sari night. Sweet drabness of home - he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing - that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant. Nobody paid attention to him here, and if they said anything at all, their words were easy, unconcerned. He looked about and for the first time in God knows how long, his vision unblurred and he found that he could see clearly.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the night, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.
Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“His lines had been honed over centuries, passed down through generations, for poor people needed certain lines; the script was always the same, and they had no option but to beg for mercy.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“The cow was not an Indian cow; therefore it was not holy?”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“All of the third-world flights docked here, families waiting days for their connections, squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps, and it was a long trek to where the European-North American travelers came and went, making those brisk, no-nonsense flights with extra leg-room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named the Milano.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“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, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

“The judge got down on his knees, and he prayed to God, he, Jemubhai Popatlal the agnostic, who had made a long hard journey to jettison his family’s prayers; he who had refused to throw the coconut into the water and bless his own voyage all those years ago on the deck of the SS Strath-naver.
"If you return Mutt, I will acknowledge you in public, I will never deny you again, I will tell the world that I believe in you – you – if you return Mutt – "
Then he got up. He was undoing his education, retreating to the superstitious man making bargains, offering sacrifices, gambling with fate, cajoling, daring whatever was out there -
Show me if you exist!
Or else I will know you are nothing.
Nothing! Nothing! – taunting it.”
― Kiran Desai, quote from The Inheritance of Loss

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