In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

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.

Don't ever let others impose their self-limiting beliefs on to you. They don't have the courage and spirit that you do.

Never give up on yourself.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

…believing sarcasm and rude remarks kept the monsters at bay. They didn’t.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

A handicapped person is a human being with the same heart as anyone else. It's not a misfortune if you can't hear-it's just an inconvenience.

America is dealing death, not only to people of other lands, but to its own people. So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut.

I wasn't popular in the home office because I wasn't chicken. I'm just a risk taker. I have gut instincts.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

In one sheet of paper, we see everything else, the cloud, the forest, the logger. I am, therefore you are. You are, therefore I am. That is the meaning of the word "interbeing." We interare.