Rosarita Quotes

“Victors climbing atop body-mountains, raising tattered flags, the flags that are required by nationhood. Mouths opening to roar: Azadi! Liberated! At their feet corpses left for vultures to gorge on. Wounds, mutilations thrust in the faces of those who survive to declare: this is Man, intrinsically, this is his history: look!”
― Anita Desai, Rosarita

“Each of us is many persons. To me I’m who I think I am, But others see me differently And are equally mistaken. “Don’t dream me into someone else But leave me alone, in peace! If I don’t want to find myself Should I want others to find me?” Fernando Pessoa SONGBOOK (1930)”
― Anita Desai, Rosarita

“You cover your eyes with your arm and beg sleep to draw down its curtain.”
― Anita Desai, Rosarita

“But the light pouring out of the cloudless sky forces your eyes to stay open and face the fact: if the ghosts and spectres that the Trickster claimed had attacked her had proven to have their roots in the realities of her ancestry, then Rosarita the Artist might also have been conjured out of a fragment of truth -- a chance encounter with a stranger in the Jardín, a charmed moment embroidered by recollection. For the Trickster the two waters met and melded, the resulting murk was her natural element; she floated in it, swam.

It was you who would not allow them to combine, struggled to keep them separate in order not to drown. What if you too allowed them to merge and become one?”
― Anita Desai, Rosarita