It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

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.

This is my present, also yours, free to choose. I am here at your side, alive, and no ghost. Let beauty and care forge the weapons tonight.

There's not one Tin Pan Alley song on my record.

Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don't understand everything.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

I haven't physically attacked anyone in a couple of years.

He that preaches war is the devil's chaplain.

Usually the hard stuff you’re forced to do makes you learn a lot.

I think Europe is going in the right direction and we shouldn't be set back.

That wife is an enemy to her husband who is given in marriage against her will.

The rest of the crowd were friends of my fortune, not of me. [Lat., Caetera fortunae, non mea, turba fuit.]