Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.
I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love
He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.
Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.
In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.
I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.
Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?" I didn't say anything.
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.
People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.
There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.
The one of the great sadnesses of any life is knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.
What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.
Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.
That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.
...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read into hardly anything at all.
Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.
So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
I see myself as someone who's been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it.
Politically I don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country.
You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
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.
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.
I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.
If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.
The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.