Favourtite quotes (or more like paragraphs) from Anita Desai's short stories from 'Games at Twilight'

Games at Twilight

• "” He had wanted victory and triumph- not a funeral. But he had been forgotten, left out and he would not join them now. The ignominy of being forgotten- how could he face it? He felt his heart go heavy and ache inside him unbearably. He lay down full length on the damp grass, crushing his face into it, no longer crying, silenced by a terrible sense of his insignificance. ”

Private tuition by Mr Bose

• "-the soft thumping of dough in the pan could be heard- sounds as soft and comfortable as sleepy pigeons. "
• ”Across the road someone turned on the radio and a song filled with a pleasant, lilting weltschmerz twirled and sank, twirled and rose from that balcony to this. Pritam raised his voice, grinding through the Sanskrit consonants like some dying, diseased tram-car.”

Studies in the park

• ”I flung myself back in my chair and howled. Get a first, get a first, get a first - like a railway engine, it went charging over me, grinding me down."
• "-when we entered the examination hall it would be to be declared officially dead. That's what the degree was about."
• "These were like official stamps- they would declare us dead. Ready for a dead world. A world in which ghosts went about, squeaking or whining, rattling or rustling."
• ”It was not just the examination but everything else had suddenly withered and died, gone lifeless and purposeless when compared with this vision. My studies, my family, my life - they all belonged to the dead and only what I had seen in the park had any meaning.”
• "Since I did not know to span the distance between that beautiful ideal and my stupid, dull existence, I simply lay still and shut my eyes."
• "- life has taken a different path for me, in the form of a search, not a race as it is for him, for them."

Surface Textures

• "-[Harish} watched them scoop out the icy orange flesh(melon) with a fearful expression on his face- as though he were observing cannibals at a feast. "
• *He held it(flat melon seed) between his two fingers, fondling it delicately. "
• “The melon might have been the apple of knowledge for Harish- so deadly its poison that he did not even need to bite into it to imbibe it”
• "All afternoon he massaged the cut edges of the book's seven hundred odd pages tenderly, wonderingly. All afternoon his eyes gazed upon them with strange devotion”

Sale

• One cannot pinpoint any school, technique, any style - one can only admit oneself in the presence of a continuous and inspired act of creation: so they tell themselves."
• ”She is so artless, so completely without any vestige of imagination.”
• " 'I will paint such snow for you as you have never seem, as no one has ever painted. I can see it all, here,' he taps his forehead with such emphasis that they smile - he is quite a comic. Or even a but crazy. Drunk? "

Pineapple cake

• "Yes, the collar of the frilled shirt was a bit tight and the church was airless and stuffy but it wasn’t very refined of him to sweat so.”
• “gave her bottom an important shake that knocked Victor against the door."
• "his head and shoes dangling like stuffed paper bags."

The Accompanist

• ”Yes, it was my very destiny to play the tanpura for a great Ustad, to sit behind him where he cannot even see me …”
• ”He gave me my destiny, my life. Could I have refused him? Does a mortal refuse God? ”
• “I owe everything to him, my very life to him.”
• " Is this not love? No marriage was closer .”
• “His fingers were the fingers of a god, absolutely in control of his instrument and I knew nothing but perfection could come of such a relationship between a musician and his instrument.”
• “You may think I exaggerate our relationship, his need of me, his reliance on my tanpura.”

The Farewell Party

• “He knew he ought to go in and see about it but he hadn't the heart, or the nerve. He couldn't join that party but he wouldn't wreck it either.”
• and they stood in a bed of balsam, irredeemably crushed, and looked into the lighted drawing room where their daughter was at the moment the cynosure of all juvenile eyes, having thrown herself with abandon into a dance of monkey-like move-ments. (lol)
• “and a bottle of Remy Martin that he was keeping guiltily to himself, pouring small quantities into a whisky glass at his elbow and gulping it down in between mixing some very weird cocktails for his guests. There was. no one at the party he liked well enough to share it with.” VS ”Raman insisted on their each having finds a glass of Remy Martin -they must finish it tonight, he said.”