In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.

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.

Something that is set can be broken, so are society standards and limits.

Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.

I think anybody who's doing work in their teen years on TV or in the movies, you're a teen idol by default.

But you don't always get what you want;,you get what you get

You know, when a man is raped you never hear about what he was wearing.

The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow.

I want to honor Jesus with the things I say and the things I choose not to say. Lord, help us all be so careful with sharing opinions as if they are truth.

Because other people are fools, must you be so too?

You've got to be a fool to want to stop the march of time.

I'm responsible. I even did a commercial for MTV saying how I was going to register to vote. And I still haven't.