Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.

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.

You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?""It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize.""Must be a human thing.""Exactly.

Old Magic, Old Ways, the Old Ones themselves often seem powerless in a new place.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

Comedy is what keeps us alive.

Our military plans should be based on the assumption of unpredictability, rather than on carefully drawn, static models of the world.

The road to success may be, and generally is, obstructed by many influences which must be removed before the goal can be reached.

I think everyone's dream is to be an actress, but I never really thought it was going to happen.

The feeling of love is the highest frequency you can emit. The greater the love you feel and emit, the greater the power you are harnessing.

Part of the early Who career was all about knocking people's confidences out.

Insurrection of thought always precedes the insurrection of arms.