Love is the use one makes of another.

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.

The most important thing you leave behind is the stuff that turns into treasures when children find it

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.

Beware of long arguments and long beards.

Trust can be a hard lesson; hope still more difficult.

Bread without love is like grass without salt -- the stomach may be filled, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

humans are born in truth, but we grow up believing in lies. one of the biggest lies in the story of humanity is the lie of our imperfection.

Sponsors and networks will really go all out and simply evaluate people on the basis of talent.

One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.

The blame is on me...I knew you were trouble when you walked in.