The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

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.

There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be...

People tend to look on the beliefs of the past as being primitive and unintelligent, yet we are seeing more truth in the past every day.

Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.

One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

You have set standards for how you want to be treated and what you expect from yourself and for yourself.

There was that feminist myth that we can do everything. I don't think you can.

Six foot six he stood on the ground He weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds But I saw that giant of a man brought down To his knees by love

America must be burned! America is no good at all.

Professors of theory merely hold post-mortems.