Kiran Desai Quotes

The past is never where you think you left it.

Once upon a time wasn't as long ago as it used to be.

I exist only in the past.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

There is a little bit of hubris to want to change the past. It implies that you know better - that things didn't happen the way that they were supposed to.

The older you get the more you live in the past

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

The past is all we know of the future.

I came in 11 years ago. I remember it like it was tomorrow

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.

How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.

The past assumes the nature of the present.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.