So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

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.

A kind soul knows impoliteness is just preoccupied with distraction.

Morality is what the queen expects from the hive, not from herself.

If you are looking for answers for your life, know that the answers are within you. When you close your eyes, and focus on your inner God (meditate), you will know what to do. Trust yourself!

I am not an adolescent, nor a romantic. I analyze objectively.

My mother went to Radcliffe, and rather than just trying to get rich, she wanted to be a teacher and taught for over 30 years in the public schools. She's definitely got some war stories.

I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day.

I think there's a big market in North America [with travelers] going to Lisbon and connecting over Lisbon.

After his death the gardener does not become a butterfly, intoxicated by the perfumes of the flowers, but a garden worm tasting all the dark, nitrogenous, and spicy delights of the soil.

Do what you love and try not to look at what other people occupy themselves with.

All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice.