Anil's Ghost

I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear....

Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

American movies, English books - remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.

For when people leave our company in our time we are never certain of seeing them again, or seeing them unaltered.

Secrets turn powerless in the open air.

The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.

A person will walk through a hundred doors to carry out the whims of the dead, not realizing he is burying himself away from the others.

At night, returning from work, Anil would slip out of her sandals and stand in the shallow water, her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her. She would stand there for a while, then walk wet-footed to bed.

I don't think clarity is necessarily truth. It's simplicity, isn't it?

You're an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It's in the bones and sediment. It's in character and nuance and mood. That is what governs us in our lives, that's not the truth. For the living it is the truth.

I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.

Even if you are a monk, like my brother, passion or slaughter will meet you someday. For you cannot survive as a monk if society does not exist. You renounce society, but to do so you must first be a part of if, learn your decision from it. This is the paradox of retreat. My brother entered temple life. He escaped the world and the world came after him. He was seventy when he was killed by someone, perhaps someone from the time when he was breaking free - for that is the difficult stage, when you leave the world.