Quotes by Sri Lankan Authors - Page 4

I would plead into the darkness, where are they, bring them back
Sonali Deraniyagala
Will there be people who will have the conscience to contribute to the country by changing themselves first? That is the need of the moment.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
It’s true that journalism in reality is not the journalism that we learnt in the university. It is far from it.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
Michael Ondaatje
It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact'---however well attested---until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.
Arthur C. Clarke
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
Black is bountiful. White is witful. Together they are beautiful.
Indeewara Jayawardane
We are citizens who love to fake life than dig deep into our reality to discover the truth and make amends and correct our own wrongdoings, because we are reluctant to learn from our past.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Families could often trace their lineage back several centuries. Their livelihood was earned from drum playing, a service considered to be dis-respectable. As members of a low caste, the drummers were forbidden to build decent houses. There were allowed to build wattle and daub huts, and to live rent-free on their patrons' properties. The right to own the country's land was restricted in this manner, a vicious condition that arose through tradition and was reinforced by law. Patterns of financial power and political hierarchy existed hand in hand.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
Ti­tles are granted or in­her­ited, no­bil­ity isn't. Whatever paper we receive, be it of material or immaterial value – it will never exceed the value of your character being loved by people!
Akilnathan Logeswaran
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
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
The main element of true reconciliation is the public education system.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Everything built with an art, May your eyes couldn't see it, but digital eye can.
Chanaka Satharasinghe.
There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.
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
Mr. President, not only are you disastrous for the land, you are the man who must be held responsible for all the sins of the cowards, the cowards who were fooled into electing you as president.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Science is great for us. But for someone who see the human evaluation for more than one million years, science is a just a one instant and younger than a baby.
Muditha Champika
We work very hard to have what Buddha gave up to become enlightened. Does that mean we are benighted?
Rohan and Mohan Perera
This is only a work of fiction , The Truth as always will be far stranger
Arthur C. Clarke
Writers should be heard, not seen.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
It was a crying shame!
Ru Freeman
The physics of gravity was not reserved only for large celestial objects to efficiently exert.
Gayendra Abeywardane
We do not have to dig deep into history to understand the reality. The examples of Saddam Hussain, who was executed after a sham trial and the case of Muammar Gaddafi, who killed after surrendering in broad daylight, have given enough factual reality to understand the painful truth.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
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
Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.
Arthur C. Clarke
The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.
Arthur C. Clarke
Strategy is about heading North while keeping an eye on the South.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
China seems to have skillfully adapted a Monroe Doctrine, or “Ménluó” (a transliteration of the word “Monroe”) Doctrine, in America’s backyard.
Patrick Mendis
I was lost in a magical mystic world as I step into the old university library. This place I would say is the birth place of the ‘writer’ in me and still one of my most loved places in the world. It was always peaceful there. Each and every moment I spent their searching for books or walking on unknown paths with the un-quenching thirst for knowledge, is cherished in my mind forever. The dark dusty corners all brown and the smell of old books untouched by readers for years, the quiet long walking passages between overloaded bookshelves were places where my magical world existed.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.
Michael Ondaatje
Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'Mentor'. The so-called joy machines were banned on all planets, except under strict medical control; but there would always be people to whom reality was not good enough, and who would want to try something better.
Arthur C. Clarke
Some love stories has no end, no path or no name, but they are 'love stories' too.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Humor was the enemy of desire.
Arthur C. Clarke
I know now that doors open as quickly as they close. That nothing very good or very bad lasts for very long.
Shehan Karunatilaka
Mr. President; give me back my country. Allow people to have their humanity. If you do not do this, history will never absolve you!
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
According to the Buddha's doctrine that they believed in, it was not the caste that defined a person high or low. It was one's deeds that mattered.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.
Michael Ondaatje
Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
Arthur C. Clarke
We all are wearing many hundred glasses of different colors. Therefore, everyone sees the world in different views. Somehow, if we could remove those glasses, we can see the world with real colors. Name of the most difficult to remove glass is ‘there are permanent things of mine.
Muditha Champika
Learning to ride a bicycle is easy once you stop worrying about falling off
Asoka Nimal Jinadasa
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
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
here was a particular kind of energy in those early days, something I've only really found in startups. The regulars - the boring 9-to-5 people - haven’t invaded the world yet. All around you are people who practically buzz with mental adrenaline - the kind of people who sneer at words like policy and dress code and fill the office at nights with pizza and bad jokes and the relentless tip-tack-clack of keyboards. They push boundaries, turn small ideas into game-changers and small arguments into fistfights.No company can last forever this way: it’s a bit like being in a cage. Eventually the strange ones move out and give way to order and conformity and all the things that make for a smoothly operating machine. But that brief chaos is what really gives a company its soul.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.
Arthur C. Clarke
True, the US Government does not have moral authority to ask for an independent investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity that occurred in final stages of the civil war in Sri Lanka. This is so not just because of what they have done in Sri Lanka, but what they do all around the world. Certainly, the US enhanced their assistance in many ways during last decades to fight against the Tamil Tiger rebels. But does the Government of Sri Lanka have moral authority to deny an international investigation? The answer is no.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
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
War crimes, you say?No matter how many policies you put on paper, in reality, there are no rights and wrongs in war. War itself is a crime. War cannot be justified. I believe, the only people, in this world, whose opinions matter, are the ones who go the extra mile to help other people expecting nothing in return. Soldiers who fight fiercely for their country, the doctors in Sri Lanka's public hospitals attending to hundreds of patients at a time for no extra pay , the nuns who voluntarily teach English and math to children of refugee camps in the north, the monks who collect food to feed entire villages during crises, they are the people worth listening to, their opinion matters. So find me one of them who will say: they wish the war didn't end in 2009, that they wish Sri Lanka was divided into two parts. Find me one of them who agrees with the international war crime allegations against Sri Lanka, and I will listen. But I will not listen to the opinions of those who are paid to find faults in a war they were never a part of, a war they never experienced themselves. I will not listen to the opinions of those who watched the war on tv or read about it on the internet or were moved by a documentary on Al Jazeera. The war is over. The damage is done. Let Sri Lanka move on. So our children will never have to see what we've seen.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Even though we are supposed to be low caste and poor our vote also has the same value and validity as that of great people.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
Reconciliation without truth is nothing but a smokescreen
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.
Roma Tearne
We lost our country somewhere along the way. We know where we lost it but we do not appear to have the strength to eliminate those blocking our view to enable us to develop our common identity.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.
Patrick Mendis
On a fulcrum in my chest, grief and relief are balanced in equal measure.
Nayomi Munaweera
The campus spreads around him like the verdant pleasure garden of an ancient king. He is enraptured by the enormous trees that lift branches like cathedral roofs overhead, shoot roots like polished ballroom floors underfoot. In the hot afternoons he leaves the crowded rooms to study under the protection of these spreading giants.
Nayomi Munaweera
...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.
Michael Ondaatje
If their horoscopes are not compatible, this marriage is out of the question.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
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
All is fair in fashion and war.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Humanity need not be taught in schools, it is a gift and skill one should master.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy