Quotes by Sri Lankan Authors - Page 2

What is human memory?" Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience - as perhaps he was. "It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a story-telling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain's neural structure. And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events. "In extreme cases, we refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and recreates the past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it's true to say that everything I remember is false.
Arthur C. Clarke
According to the Buddha's teaching the beginning of the life-stream of living beings is unthinkable. THe believer in the creation of life by God may be astonished at this reply. But if you were to ask him 'What is the beginning of God?' he would answer without hesitation 'God has no beginning', and he is not astonished at his own reply.
Walpola Rahula
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
Arthur C. Clarke
It's not a homeless life for me,It's just that I'm home lessThan others like to be.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
As things stand the "intellectuals" only come out to lick the bones left over by the tyrant.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
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
A convergence exists in the search for human excellence on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.
Patrick Mendis
Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
Michael Ondaatje
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
The era of revolution by military means produced a greater degree of desperation and frustration. This was brought to an end by the people.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
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
Light is invisible until it strikes an object. So is your love until you share it.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
The government of Pakistan is yet to understand that the insurgency is not the disease but the symptoms of the disease. If the government really needs to cure the crisis in the area, then it must engage in genuine treatment procedure rather than engage in ad hoc solutions that go under the motto: picked up, killed, and dumped. Kidnapping the target and dumping his or her bullet riddled and tortured corpse in a public place to scare the people in the area is a military strategy which aims to provide a lesson to those who still retain seeds of resistance. If this is the only solution that the government is capable of then it will have to commit genocide against the people of Balochistan so that it can continue to steal their natural resources and have total control of the province.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
To achieve the ultimate Confucian objective—a virtuous society—America has favored the rule of laws over Confucian-style virtues.
Patrick Mendis
If there is no any patience, forbearance and forgiveness. Then there is no peace.
Muditha Champika
Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.
Arthur C. Clarke
A writer is someone who analyses the society, people and the world around him or her. Simply a writer is someone who pays attention to the utmost simple things happening around him or her. I believe the best things about being a writer is, you are going to live forever through your work, in your books, in the hearts of your readers, in your characters.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Some say art is our highest form of hope. . . . Perhaps it's our only hope.
Roma Tearne
We need no language to laugh
Janaki Sooriyarachchi
I believe in magic. Writing is my magic wand, and through my magic I create my own secret world, away from all these worries and responsibilities. Love, honesty and humanity is essential to enter this beautiful world of magic. I dwell among White magical peacocks, glowing unicorns, fire breathing turquoise dragons, talking trees, flying horses, talking wise jackals and wolves, crystal water falls, secret pathways hidden in urban gardens and books with doorways to secret worlds. You need to believe in magic to experience it.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
She believed that people born to low caste families were meant to suffer. That was their karma. She had learnt that those who indulge in sinful activities in their previous birth, especially those who humiliated others, would be reborn to low caste families. She firmly believed also that one has to suffer until the sin was paid for through suffering and good deeds.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
The tyrant has power to play as long as he is the master in his surroundings.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
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
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
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
Michael Ondaatje
Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be honest and polite. But what they don't realize is no matter how much they try, their kids will get out there. Out to this complicated little world. If they are lucky they will survive, through backstabbers, broken hearts, failures and all the kinds of invisible insane pressures out there. But most kids get lost in them. They will get caught up in all kinds of bubbles. Trouble bubbles. Bubbles that continuously tell them that they are not good enough. Bubbles that get them carried away with what they think is love, give them broken hearts. Bubbles that will blur the rest of the world to them, make them feel like that is it, that they've reached the end. Sometimes, even the really smart kids, make stupid decisions. They lose control. Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second of every day. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives. You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
History is the archaeology of the present and future.
Patrick Mendis
Sometimes respect is as hard a currency as money is
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Passion is the fuel that drives ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results by aligning their hearts, minds, beliefs and efforts.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
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
At one point in your life you have to decide whether you want to become a sachem or a solitary.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
Michael Ondaatje
We can be the very first generation which fails to see the logic or pride in defining ourselves by anything else but what is found within ourselves: our values
Akilnathan Logeswaran
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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
That the military have the power to manipulate personal liberties while cocking a snook at justice and freedom in Balochistan is a fact.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
(...)Through the ship's telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth.That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen ...... the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone ...... the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift...... the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before ...... the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away ...... the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air ...In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts - not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities - even countries - had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History's closing act.
Arthur C. Clarke
Discrimination is not just racial now. It’s also about the kind of body parts you have.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.
Michael Ondaatje
But the characteristic that is truly special about our species...[is] our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme....
Arthur C. Clarke
A few years ago, a taxi driver told me about a club & a dog. A waiter spoke to me about ladders today. Life is full of lessons for those who listen.
Indeewara Jayawardane
How can you cry for others’ struggles when you are facilitating mayhem in your own land?
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
You have first flown with your mind to every goal you have ever achieved.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.
Michael Ondaatje
Mr. President, it is time for you to give me back my country. You can either continue to make fools of the people who elected a tyrant like you or let the country rise phoenix-like from the ashes.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.
Arthur C. Clarke
Honestly, I never really understood the glorification of Fridays & weekends. I don't want to build a life and career, where I spent five days a week waiting for the weekend. No! I want to enjoy my life, and don't wish any weekday away. I want each day to matter to me, in some way, even if it's a small tiny way. I love my life. Everyday. That's the spirit we should convey all around us.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
China has no choice but to emulate the power of America’s founding ideas and its journey through the universal values of democratic freedom and individual rights.
Patrick Mendis
He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness.
Arthur C. Clarke
Generally, that humble piece of furniture placed on the front veranda of the house officially belonged to the man of the household; the women never slept on it.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
People do not change. It is just that they change the masks they wear and the acts they put on, with new costumes, new dialogues and new settings.That is human nature.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks at the onrushing tidal wave, the descending avalanche, or the spinning funnel of the tornado, yet makes no attempt to flee, is not necessarily paralyzed with fright or resigned to an unavoidable fate. He may simply be unable to believe that the message of his eyes concerns him personally. It is all happening to somebody else.
Arthur C. Clarke
Scientists are human—they're as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process.
Cyril Ponnamperuma
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Arthur C. Clarke
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
To get what you want tomorrow, be grateful for what you have today.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
Victor of course never failed to fire a monster joint on these underground missions. And there he would sit reading. He liked how those books made him feel, the books and the weed, his brain humming with knowledge, an odd and lovely sort of expansion feeling these threads of words that stretched across continents and decades, a sort of feeling that he, too, was stretched and flattened, his brain spread like a map across the world.
Sunil Yapa
I do not trust people who do not wear a wrist watch.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
We have passed some of the dirtiest chapters of mankind. Perhaps we are heading towards further inhuman treatments in many places such as Syria and Palestine.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa