Time became distance for me in the way it is for all mortals.
Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.
We believe what we see.'...What do you do when you're in the dark?
I was determined to move forward.
Only fear can defeat life.
If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
Things floated in the water but none that brought me hope. I could see no other lifeboats.
Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body.
I am not an autobiographical writer.
I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.
Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.
I entered the church, without fear this time, for it was now my house too. I offered prayers to Christ, who is alive. Then I raced down the hill on the left and raced up the hill on the right—to offer thanks to Lord Krishna for having put Jesus of Nazareth, whose humanity I found so compelling, in my way.
I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
I love my prayer rug. . . . because it helped me remember that the earth is the creation of God and sacred the same all over.
I felt I was beating a rainbow to death.
You can keep your sweaty, chatty Son to yourself.
Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life.
Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.
What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object?
I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.
He found it where he should have looked first, on the Internet, which is a net indeed, one that can be cast further than the eye can see and be retrieved no matter how heavy the hall, its magical mesh never breaking under the strain but always bringing in the most amazing catch.
Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?
The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defense, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush.
Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.
Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love—but sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up.
But it was hard, oh, it was hard. Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love--but sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation, and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up.
A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely.
The men nodded vigorously at me. When they took hold of me and lifted me in their strong arms, I thought nothing of it. I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
I don't believe in religion. Religion is darkness.
I love Canada. It's a wonderful political act of faith that exists atop a breathtakingly beautiful land.
A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness.
We must do the same with death in our lives: resolve it, give it meaning, put it into context, however hard that might be.
The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. It was natural that, bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of unremitting suffering. I should turn to God.
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression.
You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!
Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.
Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!
If you went to a home, kicked down the front door, chased the people who lived there out into the street and said, Go! You are free! Free as a bird! Go! Go!—do you think they would shout and dance for joy? They wouldn't. Birds are not free. The people you've.
I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
He weeps like a child, catching his breath and hiccuping,his face drenched with tears.We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more--there is no greater relationship. [..] We are risen does, not fallen angels. Tomás is strangled by loneliness.
I quite deliberately dressed wild animals in tame costumes of my imagination.
To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.
On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, ‘Gosh, life is racing by.' But that's not it at all, it's the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.
Above all, don't lose hope.
From Matheran I mailed the notes of my failed novel. I mailed them to fictitious address.
I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.
Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone.
