In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.

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.

What we do is what means the most.

The need is the necessary want.

Fear is nothing but an enemy of progress. By all means don't permit it to win.

There is nothing in the world or the Church — except the church's disobedience — to render the evangelization of the world in this generation an impossibility.

Again, a law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way.

Just go out and drop a few hand grenades all over the place, son. (to Kevin Keegan)

It is bad to want something that not even God could attain, especially when the impossibility becomes obvious.

For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.

The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers.

There are five top superstars in golf, 20 great stars, and 30 good ones. The rest should go and get jobs.