There Are Rivers in the Sky

Words are like birds, when you publish books you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in mansions of gentry, in farmsteads and laborers' cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.

Books, like paper lanterns, provide us with a light amidst the fog.

It is an odd thing, to lose faith in the beliefs you once held firmly. How strange it is to have carried your convictions like a set of keys, only to realize they will not open any doors.

people fall into three camps: those who hardly, if ever, see beauty, even when it strikes them between the eyes; those who recognize it only when it is made apparent to them; and those rare souls who find beauty everywhere they turn, even in the most unexpected places.

Better to be a gentle soul than one consumed by anger, resentment and vengeance. Anyone can wage war, but maintaining peace is a difficult thing.

For the king knows that in order to dominate other cultures, you must capture not only their lands, crops and assets but also their collective imagination, their shared memories.

As ripples of heat rise into the air, the raindrop will slowly evaporate. But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies. Once there, it will bide its time, waiting to return to this troubled earth again…and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.

Home is where your absence is felt, the echo of your voice kept alive, no matter how long you have been away or how far you may have strayed, a place that still beats with the pulse of your heart.

Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire—because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind—when people hate those they have hurt.

Books, it seems to me, do not end, even when we are finished reading them.

Truth cloaks herself.’ ‘Why would truth need to cloak herself?’ ‘Because if she were to walk about naked, people would stone her in the streets.

The world would have been a much more interesting place if everyone was given a chance to meet their ancestors at least for an hour in their lifetime.

May life be kind to you, child, and when it is not, may you emerge stronger,

That’s the thing about failing: either it makes you super-afraid of failing again or, somehow, you learn to overcome fear.

Water remembers. It is humans who forget.

There are extraordinary people who appear unexpectedly on our paths, and just as suddenly, they disappear, leaving their indelible marks and a sense of regret. Brief and bright, like a match striking a flame in the dark, they heat the damp kindling of out hearts and then they are gone.

Empires have a way of deceiving themselves into believing that, being superior to others, they will last forever.

Arthur is beginning to suspect that civilization is the name we give to what little we have salvaged from a loss that no one wants to remember. Triumphs are erected upon the jerry-built scaffolding of brutalities untold, heroic legends spun from the thread of aggressions and atrocities.

We learn to accept there’ll always be something amiss, something broken, and unless we are kind to ourselves it won’t change, this feeling of incompleteness.

It’s just so easy to feel lost when you feel low, like you’re drifting alone in endless floodwaters. But you’re not alone. There are many of us on this wooden Ark—sailing without knowing if there is land ahead. Sailing in hope nonetheless…

If poverty were a place, a hostile landscape into which you were deliberately pushed or accidentally stumbled, it would be an accursed forest—a damp and gloomy wildwood suspended in time. The branches clutch at you, the boles block your way, the brambles draw you in, determined not to let you out. Even when you manage to cut down one obstacle, instantly it is replaced by another. You tear the skin off your hands as you work doggedly to clear a path elsewhere, but the moment you turn your back the trees close in on you again. Poverty saps your will, little by little.

The ear never forgets what the heart has heard.

Remember, my heart. Story-time is different from clock-time.’ Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward, and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past. Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness. That is why minorities do not live in clock-time. They live in story-time.

Yesterday I was a river. Tomorrow, I may return as a raindrop.

One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it is left behind.

For every displaced person understands that uncertainty is not tangential to human existence but the very essence of it.

She wants to excuse herself from a world where she often feels like an outsider, a confused and clumsy latecomer, an accidental guest who walked in through the wrong door at the wrong time.

the tree remembers what the axe forgets.

But you’re mistaken about me. If you only knew how difficult it is to be calm and composed. If you only knew, it takes a fierce fight inside to remain peaceful on the outside.

what happens when you love someone – you carry their face behind your eyelids, and their whispers in your ears, so that even in deep sleep, years later, you can still see and hear them in your dreams.