Sadness is so ungrateful.

Persecution matures young rebels.

And there is not anything in the world stronger than tenderness.

Moralists have no place in an art gallery.

Goldfish are flowers ... flowers that move.

People bring to what they see and feel, the inner weather of their souls and complexion of their minds.

A family is a burial mound of its own doings and sayings.

Many events seem to happen twice to me; even trifles, unimportant-seeming, recur, as if I were destined to live them again, time reconquered, but with added knowledge and a different outcome.

Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging.

The rice bowl is to me the most valid reason in the world for doing anything. A piece of one's soul to the multitudes in return for rice and wine does not seem to me a sacrilege.

Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.

Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.

Love can never explain the loved one, my dear. It is the essence of wild unreason.

It is the illusion of all lovers to think themselves unique and their words immortal.

All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.

This is Malaya. Everything takes a long, a very long time, in Malaya. Things get done, occasionally, but more often they don't, and the more in a hurry you are, the quicker you break down.

There is nothing in the world stronger than gentleness.

Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did.

I really can't hate more than 5 or 10 years. Wouldn't it be terrible to be always burdened with those primary emotions you had at one time?