Politically I don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country.

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.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words. A warm bed, a nest of animal intimacy. Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companionship bred trust.

In not making the decision you've made one. Not doing something is the same as doing it.

Photography can be a deceitful, superficial medium that leads us into believing something even though we know it's not necessarily true. It lulls us into a false sense of complacency.

When you get arrested it's in big letters. When you get acquitted it's in small letters.

If life was a piece of cake, it wouldn't be worth eating!

[Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.

Definition of responsibility: a commitment of the head, heart, and hands to fix the problem and never again affix blame.

I would put primary emphasis on a good standard of living equitably distributed. It can't be equal, but one that eliminates the terrible cruelty of poverty.

Even when people can't speak your language, they can tell if you have love in your heart.