We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.
I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
You don’t want to write your own opinion, you don’t want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.
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.
There’s always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
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.
In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient’s mind.
Githa Hariharan’s fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
It’s a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.
It’s an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.
Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love.