Quotes by Sri Lankan Authors - Page 6

i am happy that to have or not to have a "leffe" is not the need of the hour in my mid thirthies. A liittle bit of more lighthearted luff left.
Indeewara Jayawardane
We play hide-and-seek, wade into her ponds to fill jam jars with writhing tadpoles, and cavort with her pack of dogs, named Brandy, Whiskey, Lager, so that just calling the pack makes one feel light-headed and drunk.
Nayomi Munaweera
And yet, even while they baffled him, they aroused within his heart a feeling he had never known before. When- which was not often, but sometimes happened- they burst into tears of utter frustration or despair, their tiny disappointments seemed to him more tragic than Man’s long retreat after the loss of his Galactic Empire. That was something too huge and remote for comprehension, but the weeping of a child could pierce one to the heart.Alvin had met love in Diaspar, but now he was learning something equally precious, and without which love itself could never reach its highest fulfillment but must remain forever incomplete. He was learning tenderness.
Arthur C. Clarke
To get what you want tomorrow, be grateful for what you have today.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
Before walking in someone else’s shoes, you have to remove your shoes first.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
Wise people listen to your words. Learned people listen to their interpretation of your words.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
Together they made love among the mimeographed pages of their zine and the ink stained their bodies with letters and strange hieroglyph tattoos which they examined together in the moonlight drifting through the window, laughing.
Sunil Yapa
The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. You can't fuck yourself into a corner."That's a man talking," muttered Hana.
Michael Ondaatje
Inner negativity will attract negative energies from the universe. So be watchful of your thoughts. Don't be a magnate of negativity.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others.
Michael Ondaatje
One day with knowing the reality is better than hundred years without knowing the reality.
Muditha Champika
There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.
Arthur C. Clarke
You may kill a fire. And everything you know falls to dust and ash. Yet the remarkable treasure in this seemingly hopeless pile, is hidden deep within. The burning embers incarnate the perpetual desire to go from spark to flame.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
Day n night passing by,No tribute, we cannot deny,We did to world's problems so deep,Not a single sign, to take the leap.Senseless striving for some unknown glory,Too patiently awaiting time for our story.Still haven't spot that light,That make us seem calm n bright.How to ensure tis time-being,Is not in vain, but commencement of freeing.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
The more people I am able to help, the more people are willing to help others. The more followers we have, the closer we are to a perfect world.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
That requires as much power as a small radio transmitter--and rather similar skills to operate. For it's the application of the power, not its amount, that matters. How long do you think Hitler's career as a dictator of Germany would have lasted, if wherever he went a voice was talking quietly in his ear? Or if a steady musical note, loud enough to drown all other sounds and to prevent sleep, filled his brain night and day? Nothing brutal, you appreciate. Yet, in the final analysis, just as irresistible as a tritium bomb.
Arthur C. Clarke
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
Michael Ondaatje
The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.
Arthur C. Clarke
The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.
Arthur C. Clarke
...a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.
Arthur C. Clarke
Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.
Arthur C. Clarke
They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succour. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors.
Nayomi Munaweera
In Sri Lanka, when two strangers meet, they ask a series of questions that reveal family, ancestral village, and blood ties until they arrive at a common friend or relative. Then they say, "Those are our people, so you are our people." It's a small place. Everyone knows everyone."But in America, there are no such namings; it is possible to slip and slide here. It is possible to get lost in the nameless multitudes. There are no ropes binding one, holding one to the earth. Unbound by place or name, one is aware that it is possible to drift out into the atmosphere and beyond that, into the solitary darkness where there is no oxygen.
Nayomi Munaweera
Success has six holistic dimensions symbolized by: Heart, Mind, Body, Passion, Focus and Health.
Asoka Nimal Jinadasa
We momentarily discover our wings under life-threatening circumstances
Asoka Nimal Jinadasa
How often do we find the blind leading the not-so-blind?
Asoka Nimal Jinadasa
Is the hell we know better than a heaven we don't know?
Asoka Nimal Jinadasa
Learning to ride a bicycle is easy once you stop worrying about falling off
Asoka Nimal Jinadasa
You have first flown with your mind to every goal you have ever achieved.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again
Michael Ondaatje
A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.
Michael Ondaatje
To me bathtubs are the epitome of luxury. Either you have no money to own one or you have no time to use one.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
Sometimes respect is as hard a currency as money is
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
We have every piece of data on 200 million people,” he said, ticking off his fingers. “We have their bank accounts. We know how much they make and how much they spend and where. We have their social media. We know what they talk about, who they influence and how much. We know exactly how important each and everyone one of them is.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
The money we slaved for, bought information that kept us all trapped inside a chamber of lies and running on a greed wheel.
Gayendra Abeywardane
Some guy on the radio is asking me to take it slow, switches to a commercial and I wait for the next song. Feel very much in need of getting lost in speed of electric notes.
Gayendra Abeywardane
Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness. / At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays--especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare--or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them. / So he switched to opera--usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more. / Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. / And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.
Arthur C. Clarke
But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number.
Michael Ondaatje
If their horoscopes are not compatible, this marriage is out of the question.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
They had lived down the road from each other as children. Everyday they walked home from school hand in hand; they were childhood sweethearts, they were bestfriends. And when they came of age, in the time-honoured Sri Lankan tradition they were given in marriage. To other people.
Ashok Ferrey
In Sri Lanka, the people you lived amongst, the people you went to school with, the people in whose houses you ate, whose jokes you shared: these were not the people you married. Quite possibly they were not your religion. More to the point they were probably not your caste. This word with its fearsome connotations was never, hardly ever used. But it was ever present: it muddied the waters of Sri Lanka's politics, it perfumed the air of her bed-chambers; it lurked, like a particularly noxious relative, behind the poruwa of every wedding ceremony. It was the c-word. People used its synonym, its acronym, its antonym-indeed any other nym that came to mind - in the vain hope its meaning would somehow go away. It didn't. But if the people you chose to associate with were the very ones you could not marry, then the ones you did marry were quite often people you wouldn't dream of associating with if you had any choice in the matter.
Ashok Ferrey
There is silence and then the familiar smack of Beatrice Muriel’s palm against her forehead. “A love marriage,” she says. In her opinion, love marriages border on the indecent. They signify a breakdown of propriety, a giving in to the base instincts exhibited by the lower castes and foreigners.
Nayomi Munaweera
Peace without truth is nothing but an illusion – a deceptive misguidance which generates opportunities and problems to chew the sweet and bitter tastes of evil respectively.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings
Michael Ondaatje
Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come down for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph.
Michael Ondaatje
I just realized that sleep sometimes is the only precious wage for the hard working man.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
Foremost, step one could take is avoiding the cheap behaviour of compromising principles with decorated lies which assails the moral power of common sense.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
The victory is not only the pathway of celebration but also to take the greater degree of responsibility for those who were victimised.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
This is how we progress as humans. We went from horseless carriages to self-driving, self-organizing transport in a hundred and fifty years. We went from powered flight to putting a man on the moon in sixty years. We’ve always progressed in leaps and bounds. It is our ability, no, our duty, to do what is efficient, and to do what is best, to evolve not just our vehicles and our cities and our homes, but also the social structures that hold us back
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Humanity was an ugly word when such cruelty was inflicted on one another.
Gayendra Abeywardane
An entire planet pretending to be uncomfortable with the humanitarian crisis while engrossed in distractions on their mobile screens. Humanity ignoring their inevitable existential crisis.
Gayendra Abeywardane
. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.
Arthur C. Clarke
History has taught us that the idea of superpower is for a political maniac to design the art of control over other countries.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.
Patrick Mendis
This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To them, the only purpose of the Universe was the production of intelligence, and they were apt to talk sneeringly about purely astronomical phenomena, 'Mere dead matter' was one of their favourite phrases.
Arthur C. Clarke
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Arthur C. Clarke
I love the smell of pastels...that breaths life into my soul.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Some say art is our highest form of hope. . . . Perhaps it's our only hope.
Roma Tearne
Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.
Arthur C. Clarke
Grey has no agenda. . . . Grey has the ability, that no other colour has, to make the invisible visible.
Roma Tearne