Jayati

“cried for herself because her parents had not been happy forever after, because you can’t have children if you’re not going to always be happy or if you’re not going to live forever—how could you be so careless and heartless? The hundred contradictory ways she felt about her parents would make her an insane person, a divided person, a person who would never be calm or whole.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Raga Yaman, for example, played by Sultan Khan on the sarangi, was a contemplative piece of music longer than time, longer than sorrow.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“During stressful times it was inevitable that you began to think your child was an idiot who would be able to handle nothing—until you were drawn in the other direction by pride in their naïve honorableness, a desire to share in their shadow-free lives in rich countries where it was normal to criticize Third World corruption, ignoring the massive corruption of the First World, before which we are all ants trying to get an impossible view of an elephant.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“as if I’ve hooked into a big, impossible plug of sadness resting on the bottom of the river.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall: Stories