I see myself as someone who's been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it.

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 greatest mistake is for a man to forsake his Maker.

So ... will you stay with me until it's over? Please?" "Kaylee, I would do anything for the girl who granted my dying wish.

Is there anyone nearby you can speak to without words?”“I don’t know. I only know that there are those whose minds I can speak with that, when I show them how, speak back to my mind as well.

What’s wrong with denouncing white interlopers?

I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.

It's a total injustice. Things like that happen in life.

One cannot let the events of one's past murder one's future.

In bed we laugh, in bed we cry, and born in bed, in bed we die; the near approach a bed may show of human bliss to human woe.

Fever itself is Nature's instrument.

It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.