Quotes by Sri Lankan Authors - Page 2

Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.
Arthur C. Clarke
I am so proud of my father; he is the biggest example of success and courage I have ever seen in my life. He is the emperor of my kingdom. Of course, my father IS an emperor, his name is Asoka, the greatest emperor ruled in India. Moreover, as the name says, he is ‘without sorrow’ and the slayer of our sorrows.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
No doubt, a father he is the most respected man in our lives, the most admired person. He is the protector, and the guardian of our lives.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
A father’s tears and fears are unseen, his love is unexpressed, but his care and protection remains as a pillar of strength throughout our lives.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.
Arthur C. Clarke
But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]
Michael Ondaatje
There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.
Michael Ondaatje
Treasures are hidden and hard to find but if we could find a real treasure, it will shine our lives. In the similar way ultimate reality is hidden and hard to find but if we could find it, it will shine our lives.
Muditha Champika
Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.
Arthur C. Clarke
Some needs superseded our own wellbeing, and we let ourselves be destroyed by greed and results of our own careless mistakes. We pretend not to notice, the things that meaninglessly deplete us away.
Gayendra Abeywardane
The greatest betrayal is betraying yourself.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory.
Arthur C. Clarke
Football is the poetry of a motion.
Pubudu Lasal Dissanayake
Watching a parent die is a terrible task. My father, faced with something he could not talk down or browbeat into submission, spent his days with the bottle, as if he determined to drink himself to death, as if his alcohol could hold back the disease that swept through his brain.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
You know how when you step on court your coach is like "go go go!"? And all throughout you just keep telling yourself to hit harder and harder and keep at it? You know how much you treasure those five-minute timeouts? You know how good you feel at the end of a session? You know how you're glad you're tired? No pills, no shots, just plain energy. I want to work like that. Whether I have to write ten thousand words or send five hundred emails, brainstorm for hours at a time, I want to have that energy. To keep fighting. To know it's all worth it. Oh, yeah. That's my perfect day.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
You are perfectly imperfect, and that made me fall for you.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
At first, you get your jaw broken but next time you know better than anyone how to protect yourself.
Gayendra Abeywardane
He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship and solidarity which they unconsciously craved.
Arthur C. Clarke
There's water in my bonesa ghost of a chance
Michael Ondaatje
It was something I learned then. That you could take the crumpled remains of something destroyed and smooth them into newness. You could pretend certain things weren't happening even if you had seen or felt them. Everything done can be denied.
Nayomi Munaweera
On some days it felt like we owned the Earth, and the only place left to expand to was the next planet down the line.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
What strange and thoughtless creatures we were, back in those days. We would go up to the rooftops to smoke, Wurth and I; and there in the company of other insomniac souls we would look out at the vast expanse of lights and glamour. We watched the towers as they climbed higher, and higher, as humanity reached for the skies.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
She is the creature of life, the giver of life, and the giver of abundant love, care and protection. Such are the great qualities of a mother. The bond between a mother and her child is the only real and purest bond in the world, the only true love we can ever find in our lifetime.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Then too, motherhood is broken because in this place, to be a good mother is to give yourself completely. It is to erase yourself. This is what I refused to do.
Nayomi Munaweera
Afterward, Sara didn't really remember falling asleep, still wearing her robe although she meant to get dressed and had had Serafina lay out a pair of jeans and a blouse for her. In any case, she had slept. And there had been dreams -- of the unsettling kind she didn't want to recall.
Rosemary Rogers
Mangers consolidate the present. Leaders create the future.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
How fair is it to judge a person based on his sexual preferences, or their ‘otherness’? As long as a person is not ‘harmful’ for others or not violating the rights of others, I think we need not be bothered about their personal lives, whom they love or whom they marry. It is a personal choice. I think the most important thing about a person is his or her ‘humanity’, kindness, selflessness not their ‘sex life’ (only as long as he or she is not violating the rights of others or causing harm to others).It is entirely a disgrace on humanity to ‘discriminate’ a person solely based on their ‘otherness’. I am surprised to see how the society stands against or make fun out of ‘gay’ people, who are totally harmless, ignoring the ‘human’ in them, but feel ‘OK’ with ‘rapists’, ‘sex maniacs’, ‘prostitution’ and ‘sexual violence against women and children’ occurring in Sri Lanka every day.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Life was less of a mystery for every digit that age handed over to him. Time, however, became more cryptic and dealt in destructive consequences.
Gayendra Abeywardane
If any religion turns against love of equal partners, there's something flawed with the religion, not the love.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
They hate me because I am the worst thing possible. I am the bad mother.But here's a secret: in America there are no good mothers. They simply don't exist. Always, there are a thousand ways to fail at this singularly important job. There are failures of the body and failures of the heart. The woman who is unable to breastfeed is a failure. The woman who screams for the epidural is a failure. The woman who picks up her child late knows from the teacher's cutting glance that she is a failure. The woman who shares her bed with her baby has failed. The woman who steels herself and puts on noise-canceling earphones to erase the screaming of her child the next room has failed just as spectacularly. They must all hang their heads in guilt and shame because they haven't done it perfectly, and motherhood is, if anything, the assumption of perfection.
Nayomi Munaweera
Democratically-oriented Jeffersonian inspiration has prevailed throughout history and certainly been more admired than capitalistic Hamiltonian-style motivations of greed and power.
Patrick Mendis
I am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate.
Sonali Deraniyagala
Their promise, my children's possibilities, still linger in our home.
Sonali Deraniyagala
You realize how much you love someone once that someone is gone…gone forever, and you are filled with regret and sadness.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
If anyone makes you feel less than you are, for the color of you skin, for where you come from, for the gender of the person you love, for the religion you have faith in, stand up, speak up, roar. No silence till we are equal.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Black is bountiful. White is witful. Together they are beautiful.
Indeewara Jayawardane
Black is bountiful. White is witful. Both are beautiful.
Indeewara Jayawardane
Laws ostensibly directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the treatment of lawfully present immigrants and citizens who share the ethnic, racial, or national origin characteristics of undocumented immigrants.
Pratheepan Gulasekaram
The 1790 Naturalization law determined that "free white persons" could naturalize after two years of residency, and established that the children of citizens would also be citizens. Soon after, in 1795, Congress extended the residency period to five years, and in 1798 extended the residency requirement even further, to fourteen years.
Pratheepan Gulasekaram
Discrimination is not just racial now. It’s also about the kind of body parts you have.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
People keep saying someone should fix the system, the system is corrupt. What they don’t get is; they are the system. It’s just like how people hate McDonald’s and Coca Cola. People say they are evil corporations, terrorists and ruining the health of the future but then, how are these brands live and running all over the world, making billions of dollars of profit every day? People still buy it, that’s how. The majority of the world is people who know something is bad for them but keep consuming it. If it’s so bad for you, why buy it? If the system is so bad, why do they vote for it? It’s the people who need to change not the leaders.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
What we see in a democracy governed by “representatives” is not a government “for the people” but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Failed coup has put the people in general on a long trudge to freedom while creating a situation to consolidate more power to exercise the legitimised arbitrariness of Erdoğanian democracy.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
President George Washington’s namesake capital, once a marketplace for slave auctions, is now synonymous with democracy and freedom; so is the iconic Jefferson, who wanted to build an “Empire of Liberty” for the world.
Patrick Mendis
He read the words, wondering when cruelty won the vote from democracy.
Gayendra Abeywardane
Yes, life is hard, but it's not a bad way to pass the time. When all is said and done, I recommend it.
Nury Vittachi
Today’s China is an artifact of an extended and contentious history while the relatively young American Republic is a daring project informed by the enlightenment philosophy espoused by the Founding Fathers.
Patrick Mendis
Julius used to say that we stood on the shoulders of giants. To me it always seemed like we were in their shadow. It never occurred to me that we were the shadow that they projected, and that one day we would rise up and overwhelm them
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
What did journalists know of tech, anyway? Who gave a damn about the press? We were the Good Guys. Changing the World. Doing the Important Stuff.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
This is the Number. It is in the things we do, the people we meet, the ID cards that we carry. It's part of our identities, our credit cards, our social interactions. It takes our influences, our biases, morals, lifestyles and turns them into a massive alternate reality that no-one can escape from. It lives on our phones, in our televisions, in the cards we swipe to enter office. At its best, it’s an exact mirror of how human society actually works - all our greatness, all our petty shallowness, all our small talk and social contacts all codified and reduced and made plain. At its worst, it’s also exactly that. It’s how poor and rich and famous and desirable you are. It’s the backchannel given a name and dragged out into the limelight for everyone to see.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
We’re going to tell these people that they dropped because Facebook dropped us. We're going to say the Number needs the data and it's their right to share it with us. And we’re going to drop their Numbers again. And again. Until they riot on the Internet and make those Menlo Park motherfuckers come to us with their hats in their hands.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
The thing I always wanted to say is that surviving abuse sucks. But it's also a choose-your-own-adventure story.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
In the morning she found pieces of a birdchopped and scattered by the fanblood sprayed onto the mosquito net,its body leaving paths on the wallslike red snails that drifted down in lumps.She could imagine the featherswhile she had sleptfalling around herlike slow rain.
Michael Ondaatje
Two ideas are psychologically deep-rooted in man: self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and security, just as a child depends on its parent. For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal Soul or Atman, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.
Walpola Rahula
Whatever is impermanent is dukkha’ (Yad aniccaṃ taṃ dukkhaṃ).
Walpola Rahula
Equanimity is a perfect, unshakable balance of mind, rooted in insight. But in its perfection and unshakable nature equanimity is not dull, heartless and frigid. Its perfection is not due to an emotional “emptiness”, but to a “fullness” of understanding, to its being complete in itself.Its unshakable nature is not the immovability of a dead, cold stone, but the manifestation of the highest strength.
Nyanaponika Thera
Animosity does not eradicate animosity. Only by loving kindness is animosity dissolved. This law is ancient and eternal. (attributed to Buddha)
Ananda Maitreya
We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. A well known modem writer on the subject has remarked that “Buddhism in its purity ignored the existence of a God; it denied the existence of a soul; it was not so much a religion as a code of ethics”. We can understand the appeal of this on the one hand to the rationalist and on the other to the sentimentalist. Unfortunately for these, all three statements arc untrue, at least in the sense in which they are meant. It is with another Buddhism than this that we arc in sympathy and are able to agree; and that is the Buddhism of the texts as they stand.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
You can rewire your brain and reinvent your life at any age
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
When the time has come, every leaf turns to face the sun!
Akilnathan Logeswaran