Anil's Ghost Quotes
"In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by."
"Nothing lasts, it is an old dream. Art burns, dissolves. And to be loved with the irony of history—that isn’t much."
"If you are wrong the first time, redraw the picture. Maybe you can catch what was overlooked."
"In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty."
"All real effort and energy when she was a kid seemed to have happened by seven-thirty in the morning."
"She had hunted down the desired name like a specific lover she had seen and wanted, tempted by nothing else along the way."
"The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed."
"Truth bounced between gossip and vengeance. Rumour slipped into every car and barbershop."
"We are often criminals in the eyes of the earth, not only for having committed crimes, but because we know that crimes have been committed."
"It was finally realized that while European culture was old, Asian culture was older."
"Every rock cuneiform or carving had to be drawn and redrawn...until it was a part of dreams."
"He approached runes not with a historical text but with the pragmatic awareness of locally inherited skills."
"Archaeology lives under the same rules as the Napoleonic Code."
"Perhaps this was the result of being the brother of a monk."
"The detailed verses Palipana had published seemed at first to have ended arguments and debates by historians."
"It was only when a book was completed that his terrierlike focus would shift away from a project."
"Palipana always seemed to be saving himself for the language of history."
"For most of the year it was dark and warm and only during the monsoons would the letters be filled with water."
"He was in his seventies, his eyesight worrying him."
"The graffiti at the great rock fortress of Sigiriya was located on an overhang at the first quarter-mile mark of ascent."
"He spread his fingers over every discovered rune."
"He was more likely to work beside a stonemason or listen to a dhobi woman washing clothes at a newly discovered rock pool than with a professor from the University of Peradeniya."
"The water filled a cut alphabet and linked this shore and that."
"There was no longer any respect accorded to his career."
"He lived in the forest grove with his books and writing tablets."
"All history was filled with sunlight, every hollow was filled with rain."
"He approached the site knowing what would be there—whether a distinct pattern of free-standing pillars in a clearing or a familiar icon drawn on a cave wall high above."
"His eyes recognized how a fault line in a rock wall might have insisted on the composure of a painted shoulder."
"He appeared to spend all his spare energy on empathy. When she wept, he would weep."
"It was the first handcuff of marriage, and it almost buried her."
"You’ve gone for something, and I know you won’t be back."
"The whole marriage and divorce, the hello and goodbye, she treated as something illicit."
"They snuffed out death with music and craziness."
"Lovers who read stories or look at paintings about love do so supposedly for clarity."
"She rose from the bed in Borrego and took a shower sitting on the edge of the bath, facing the rain of it."
"A good archaeologist can read a bucket of soil as if it were a complex historical novel."
"It was like being in a room with three suitors, all of whom had blood on their hands."
"The country existed in a rocking, self-burying motion."
"She had arrived in Colombo directly from working in sparse high-tech desert towns of the American Southwest."
"She was now alongside the language of science."
"Traits of the country like those of a complex friend."
"They couldn’t miss death, it was in every texture and cell around them."
"Everyone pays attention. My brother told you that. People knew you were in Colombo the moment you got here."
"All my papers are in that building. I have to get them back."
"The skeleton I had was evidence of a certain kind of crime. That is what is important here."
"Political secrets are not powerless, in any form."
"But the tension and danger around them, one can make them evaporate."
"I love history, the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream."
"We slept like pillars of stone, remaining in the same position they had lowered themselves into."
"You always thought Cherry Valance would die."
"I’m staying at my aunt’s house in Boralesgamuwa, and she and her friends were playing bridge on the long porch."
"I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses."
"They could in their hideous skills sniff out vanity. But they had not touched Sarath’s face."
"It was what it was. No longer a counter of argument, no longer an opinion that Gamini refused to accept."
"President Katugala was in a white cotton outfit, looking old, not at all like the giant posters of him throughout the city."
"R—— had more clothing on above the denim shorts. Four Velcro straps held the explosives pack to his body."
"At street level, in the crowd, the only presidential presence was a giant cardboard cut-out of him carried like a film prop."
"No one knows really if R—— came with this new procession, as seems most likely, or whether he was at the junction where the group met the larger crowd."
"Around him were the dead. Political supporters, an astrologer, three policemen."
"The cutting action of the explosion shredded Katugala into pieces."
"In the coldness of the world, halfway up, it seemed that only the fires below connected him to earth."