I’m not ambitious. I don’t want to get anywhere, I don’t want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don’t want anything. I don’t want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.
The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.
He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.
It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
When you say things like, ‘We have to wipe out the Taliban,’ what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.
Things can change in a day.
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.
And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.
What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.
Some things come with their own punishments.
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.
The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.
Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.
The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.
It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.
Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.