So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.

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.

As a sea is full of drops of liquid, I was but one in the ocean of WarMany are swept ruthlessly into the battering, bashing waves, and only few survive to swim to shore

I'm always angry about the death of people who are still alive, their eyes are opened, yet they can't see anything...the spell of ignorance

You have to treat yourself like a mushroom to some degree, in order to keep on discovering things.

Men are committing the rapes. Let them be put under curfew.

I love clothes, but I don't know what to put on myself, let alone others. I have a lot of help getting dressed.

It is fun to be alive. It's a hell of a lot better than being dead.

For sure Tupac [Shakur]. Without a doubt. I have to have Pac at the party doing it!

Sectors of power are not going to favor the flourishing of dissidence.

Men who could willingly resign the luxuries and sensual pleasures of a large fortune cannot consent to live without the grandeur and the homage.

My only hope for the world is in bringing the human mind into contact with divine revelation.