If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.

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.

If you were three times poor, I would still have paid attention to you and fell head over heels in love with you.

Every day kindness can change many hearts.

There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.

Whatever my aims and agendas were, I never asked for power.

Thinking of Plan B muddies up your chances of succeeding at Plan A.

We write to discover what we think.

Trust may be in short supply after years of disappointments. However, improvement could come in a bat of an eye!

The wand ricocheted through the swarm, thumping six, seven, eight of the little monsters before returning to Carter’s hand. “Not bad,” I said. “Keep it up!

People power. It has no limits. In politics, every politician in Ukraine is afraid of that. They know, if people go to the streets, nobody feels safe.

Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.