A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion

There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

The problem isn't finding out where you are gonna go-its figuring out what you are gonna do once you get there that is! (Jamie Sullivan)

Diets are for people who are thick and tired of it.

Dreams are the way to unfulfilled wishes in the individual; visions are the way to unfulfilled dreams in mankind.

Sophistication demands honesty; it does not require ill temper.

Mortality is the most romantic story ever told. Just one chance to do everything you should. Then, magically, you move on.

That becomes the revolution, to be idealistic enough that you think you can change the world, and what you find is you can't change anything but yourself.

War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

If I'm going to feel estranged and alienated and away from home I don't want anyone interrupting it to debate which berries to have in their pancakes.

Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.

Seek those who help you hear your own heart.