Kiran Desai Quotes

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away.

The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain

The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.

Next to the highest peak of happiness, there’s the deepest gap of pain.

She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were dark, almost black, filled with pain. She'd let someone do that to her. She'd known all along she felt things too deeply. She became attached. She didn't want a lover who could walk away from her, because she could never do that - love someone completely and survive intact if her left her.

But I don't want to have to stop feeling. I really think I'd rather die than stop feeling.

I just want to feel everything.

Think about love, or hate, or joy, or pain- whatever makes you feel something, makes your palms sweat, or your toes curl. Focus on that feeling. When people don't express themselves, they die on piece at a time.

An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.

Grief is nature’s most powerful aphrodisiac.

Our sense of the tragic waxes and wanes with our sensuality.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

Your eyes wider than distance, this life is sweeter than fiction.

Till I loved I never lived.

I think it's one of the nicest privileges as an actor is to know that you can move people in one moment, make them think about their lives, or make them laugh or make them cry or make them understand something. Or just make them feel something because I think so many of us, including myself, spend too much time not feeling enough, you know?

Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard.

A joy as intense as pain

Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe,—but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully.

I close my eyes and it's so real and all at once I know just what I feel - And baby it's the kind of rush that terrifies.

Happiness not only needs no justification, but it is also the only final test of whether what I am doing is right for me. Only of course happiness is not the same as pleasure; it includes the pain of losing as well as the pleasure of finding.

Our greatest joy and our greatest pain comes in our relationships with others.

Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power. In the present instance the stage is a scrubbed gun deck, and one of the external provocations a man-of-war's-man's spilled soup.

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

I didn't need more fame or money. I needed more heart.