The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny Quotes

“There was so much life in this country that Sunny needn’t bother to create one. His life could be simply looking upon life.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“too weighted by sadness, too light from emptiness.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“If you are lonely, you feel ashamed, and the only relief to your shame is being alone, which is what makes you lonely in the first place.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Mama read David Copperfield again. She had become one of those characters in the novels that she loved, the people who read Dickens in the jungle over and over. Why? Because when Dickens is better than your life, then why live your life? It would be foolishness not to read Dickens instead.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“It was too much to ask to be loved all the way through life, and you could return to the memory for sustenance. Being loved all the time might be a curtailment, a redundancy. It”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Many of us don’t live in communities any longer, where you are cherished just for your family having been known for generations, where everyone stays in the same place. Then if you are religious, that alters everything because you are part of a people with a history and faith that allows you to belong not only in the present but also in the past and future. But if you have no home, no faith, no community, and a scattered, inattentive, or resentful family, you are alone in the big world.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Mama got up, went into her bedroom, and shut the door. A woman must stay alone for a long while until the hate men have for women has left her, and even longer until the jealousy women have for other women has left her, and longer still until the anger her children have for her has left her—until she is no longer a woman altered by the resentment of men, women, and children, no longer what others have forced her to be, but empty as a skull or a shell, filled only by whatever she pleases, forest air perhaps.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“What was so odd, Babita reflected, was that this striving to escape India felt patriotic: If you were a worthy Indian, you became an American.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Without people one is nothing,”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“It is exhausting to be near such greed.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“If India existed, then America could not, for they were too drastically different not to cancel each other out. Yet despite this fact, they refused to remain apart. India invaded his life all the way from the other side of the world, and then life here became instantly artificial,”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“He read Frida Kahlo’s diary in Spanish. The words were simple and strange because they came straight from the soul. He examined his fingers instinctively to make sure they hadn’t been bloodied by her bloody paintings of hearts, wombs, and accidents.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“The love is in the sauce,” which had always irritated Sunny. He wanted only sauce in his sauce.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“It was all the things I’d have to do alone.” “Why would you have to do anything alone?” asked Babita. “It’s the premise of being American: You are an individual, therefore you are alone. Therefore you must be able to do everything by yourself. Rent a car at an airport, drive yourself cross-country to a job in a place you’ve never heard of, defeat your enemies, trap a rat, make money to pay bills to look after yourself even when you are dying—”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“At the moment the plane parted from the runway, she felt the relief of escaping the endless waiting for a person who has abandoned you.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“I spend all my time trying to pretend I am not lonely!” If you are lonely, you feel ashamed, and the only relief to your shame is being alone, which is what makes you lonely in the first place.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“a reader of novels comprehends the notion of individual rights by the simple act of identifying with a person’s—any person’s—trials and joys.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Pamper yourself. Don’t wait for anyone else to do so. Love yourself first”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“He had an irrational jealousy that went back to our childhood”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Laziness in India is infuriating and equals animosity. In Italy it indicates an enjoyment of life’s pleasures. “Candlelight in a trattoria is romance. In India it equals power failure and a testing of romance.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“She has refused to make a life for herself”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“strove”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“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

“because hell hath no fury like a man who is not the center of attention.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Sunny said that if Kashmiris didn’t wish to be part of India”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“The United States had stolen her sweet son and transformed him into a foreigner trumpeting the American mantra of individuality and self-sufficiency in order to disguise his selfishness.”
― 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

“Western psychology is no match for an Indian family. We are too slippery, we change shape, we don’t distinguish truth from lies. Lies are truth and truth are lies—you can’t pin us down.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Yet again Sunny had been identified as a more desirable match because his manner-clothes-address-accent fit the profile of a particular Delhi elite.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Here, as there, were snow mountains, hermit poets, twisted pines growing out of rock, silence married to shadow, shadow twinned to gaunt winter light, to skeleton light, to light subtracted upon faded floorboards, to evening light red as a fox that curled for a moment in the white porcelain on the sideboard.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny