I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love

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.

Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor.

I think if someone is writing continuously for 10 years and has not changed their mind about something - there's something wrong with them. They're not really thinking.

Mindfulness is a mental activity that in due course eliminates all suffering.

So there's kind of a simultaneous aspect to pushing the boundaries, and being very safe

All paths lead nowhere, so it is important to choose a path that has heart.

A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.

You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.

I am thoroughly satisfied that smoking is detrimental to the intelligence of Australians who I notice now are beginning to look sickly, pale and intellectually destitute.

To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.

We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.