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Anita Desai

"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."

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"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."

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Akiroq Brost

"Dr. Rex Curry, the professor and attorney from Florida, has debated and largely proven the unavoidable evidence that Hitler's National Socialism was significantly influenced by Bellamy's 'nationalistic' form of 'socialism.' Curry is famous for making the claim that Hitler adopted the 'stiff-arm salute' from Francis and Edward Bellamy."

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Akiroq Brost

"Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word."

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Akiroq Brost

"Nationalism leads to all sorts of nasty things (even Nazi things) like fascism and war."

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Akiroq Brost

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."

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Akiroq Brost

"I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go, too! I want to go, too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going."

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Akiroq Brost

"They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff."

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Akiroq Brost

"With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence."

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Akiroq Brost

"Yes, King Edward VI lived only a few years, poor boy, but he lived them worthily."

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Akiroq Brost

"Mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another."

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Akiroq Brost

"According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future."

Explore more quotes by Anita Desai

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Anita Desai
"I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges."
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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."
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Anita Desai
"I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth."
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Anita Desai
"Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better."
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Anita Desai
"When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process."
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Anita Desai
"Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed."
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Anita Desai
"People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way."
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Anita Desai
"Ever since I could first write I have been doing so. When I was taught how to write and read at school, I made up my mind that this was what I love to do best and this was the world I was going to occupy."
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Anita Desai
"My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly."
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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."
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