“Unlike his compatriots - many of whom were still, in their mid-twenties, adolescent posturers, doomed to futility - he had an engaging earnestness about him. Unlike them, he realized his incomplete...”

“The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth that billions of consumers in India & China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans is as absurd & dangerous a fant...”

“In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support.”

“National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceiv...”

“In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.”

“The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“Bear your pain or it will come back”

“So the gods must mean something else, said Jix.God, not gods! insisted Johnnie.Nick threw up his hands. God, gods, or whatever, said Nick. Right now, it doesnt matter whether its Jesus, or Kukulcan...”

“A gift can never be cheap or insignificant because of the heart and love it carries.”