I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

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.

That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)

It's a sweet thing to sit quietly in the early-morning darkness and talk to God for a while. It's amazing what you gain from the conversation.

Licking your wounds will not stop the bleeding, but applying pressure will.

A clear division between good and evil, right and wrong, would simplify everything, but life was rarely simple.

He was crying in there, making woman gestures.

God loves me. I'm not here just to fill a place, just to be a number. He has chosen me for a purpose. I know it.

I started skating when I was six years old.

Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.

There is no reality but God , says the completely surrendered sheik, who is an ocean for all beings.

It is not blood that makes you Irish but a willingness to be part of the Irish Nation.