Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.

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.

Life is neither a party nor pain. But a prayer.

The language for attaining Liberation [moksha] is beyond duality. The language for worldly life is with duality.

Don't follow your heart as it can lead you astray, but instead, open your heart and allow God to lead you.

Love is of all passions the strongest for it attacks simultaneously the head the heart and the senses.

The history of America is to expand civil liberties in a responsible and civil manner. We need to remember that our wonderful Democracy with its freedoms has been working.

Once you've been in a mental institution, people are going to look at you funny.

If a person remains tense for a long time he might not notice it himself, but it’s like his nerves are a piece of rubber that has been stretched out. It’s hard to go back to the original shape.

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.

If this had ever happened before, it couldn't be happening now. That's what they mean by 'once in a lifetime'.

Opposition is the very spur of love.