Quotes by Sri Lankan Authors - Page 6

There is no right and wrong, and precepts are for fools. Every thing is just as it is! And we must experience things without condemning them, because if we condemn them, then we are becoming too involved.
Ru Freeman
You can leave Hong Kong, but it will never leave you.
Nury Vittachi
Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.
Arthur C. Clarke
He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.
Michael Ondaatje
I have always loved being behind the camera. I love how it sets you apart in a crowd, so that you can float at the edges, pausing only occasionally to capture a moment.In its own way it’s easier than writing. As a writer, I have to know people, to talk to them, to barge into silences with a dozen of those little lighthearted quips that lead up to a conversation. And even then, they’re guarded around you. Nobody wants their drunken conversation written down somewhere.Being a photographer is different. People come to you. They smile. They flirt. They make sure you see only their best side. Nobody wants to upset the camera.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Words are my weapons. They might kill or cure the readers, that’s out of my control.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
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 must love yourself before you can love others.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
The decrease in the number of killings doesn’t make any difference if the society has to sleep with the ghosts of the old devil.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
There's water in my bonesa ghost of a chance
Michael Ondaatje
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
Developing leaders without a model is like building a house without a plan.
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
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
Imagine that every man’s mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent, but the individuality would have gone
Arthur C. Clarke
I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.
Arthur C. Clarke
Let us applaud the howls of the ignorant extremists as we stand on a knife-edge, not glad, but in acknowledgement of the bad, sad, mad gifts that the regime continue to offer us.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
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
Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible.
Arthur C. Clarke
For twenty-seven years I was told and believed it to be true, that if you really liked someone, you'd wish her/him to 'stay the way s/he is'.Today I know that I was not wrong, but my view was limited. If I really like someone today, I don't want them to merely stay that way, I want them to grow, to discover their potential, and am excited to see who they choose to become.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: “We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good behavior.
Arthur C. Clarke
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
Writing gives me wings.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
Every New Yorker thinks they’re automatically better than everyone else in every other city on the planet: even their unnems were a better class of beggars.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
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
Her ghost is still orbiting Earth inside the tiny dim lit room. Orbiting endlessly like an invisible moon circling our beautiful blue planet.
Gayendra Abeywardane
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
Michael Ondaatje
We're experiencing the genesis of a community where it does not matter where your roots lie, but what you believe in. We will continue to create an inclusive and sustainable spirit, spreading the word from coast to mountaintop.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
Long before Christopher Columbus, the celebrated Chinese navigator Zheng He travelled through the south and westward maritime routes in the Indian Ocean and established relations with more than thirty countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Patrick Mendis
Killing life in whatever way, will drag you along the hell's way.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
Do you understand the sadness of geography?
Michael Ondaatje
It is hard to draw any line between compassion and love.
Arthur C. Clarke
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
Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for us to change the mindset which has tended to create ad hoc solutions for the political madness and social farce. In fact, our age of tragedy which has been represented by the so-called “Marxists” in the Sinhalese community and “liberalists” in Tamil community since the 70s to the late 90s, has been replaced by the age of farce.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
You can rewire your brain and reinvent your life at any age
Dr. Asoka Jinadasa
Valuing a writer only for their diversity, but not their humanity or talent – that’s tokenism.
Sunili Govinnage
I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.
Michael Ondaatje
Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.
Michael Ondaatje
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.
Michael Ondaatje
Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free.
Michael Ondaatje
Humanity was an ugly word when such cruelty was inflicted on one another.
Gayendra Abeywardane
Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.
Michael Ondaatje
My boys. I don't have them to hold. What do I do with my arms?
Sonali Deraniyagala
Never expect appreciation for your hard work. Just continue, it will take you to the top.
Janaki Sooriyarachchi
Didn’t somebody once say ‘Politics is the art of the possible’?” “Quite true—which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke
When man lost touch with his humanity he had no reason to walk along the higher path.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
I recounted my adventures, just as I recount them to you now. I told him about Bombay, which glowed in the night like a lamp. I told him about Bangalore, about the beaches of Goa, of Pune, where elaborate retirement homes and ashrams ringed India’s ferociously competitive colleges, and liberals went to experience transcendence without getting their feet dirty. I told him of places you could expand your mind and still be within walking distance of the nearest McDonalds.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
The thing about life is, you’ve got to somehow make it through the day. Don’t wait for the beautiful evening. Go on with your life. Of course, the beautiful evening will come. In fact, she’s on her way. And she’s coming to you as fast as she can. And dude, she’s beautiful.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
The evolution of national unity and equal rights is all about what America represents as a nation today: a manifestation of the historical episodes of Jefferson and Henry as well as the Civil War, the Women’s Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights struggles.
Patrick Mendis
There must be some atom of our life hidden here, lingering in this quiet somewhere.
Sonali Deraniyagala
Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.
Arthur C. Clarke
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
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
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
Our innocent kids undergo much trouble. Not only do the children of high caste families look down upon our children calling them low caste brats, but even some teachers ridicule them. They beat our children for no reason.
Swarnakanthi Rajapakse
I believe in god. I also believe that you should never ask god to make your dreams come true. You have to work for your dreams. And dream actually, with all your mind body and soul. I don’t believe luck is when a super power grants us what we wished for. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. So we need to be prepared all the time. Our dream awaits us. It’s already on its way. We just need to be prepared when it gets to us.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Football is the poetry of a motion.
Pubudu Lasal Dissanayake
Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.
Arthur C. Clarke
Is the hell we know better than a heaven we don't know?
Asoka Nimal Jinadasa
Vibe high and the magic around you will unfold.
Akilnathan Logeswaran