“But the boy who left the hall was not the boy who had gone in some ten minutes before. After my college days, my political work, and after my years of stay at Uttarkashi at the feet of my master, Tapovanam I knew that what I gained on the Ganges banks was that which had been given to me years before by the saint of Tiruvannamalai on that hot summer day – by a mere look”

“ahhhh… satchel, my boy, there's nothin' like a tuna smoothie on a hot summer day…”

“I had given up my seat before, but this day, I was especially tired. Tired from my work as a seamstress, and tired from the ache in my heart.”

“I knew metal working before I knew Calder [famous for his sculptures, made in sheet metal], and Calder is one of our great men and he is earlier by a few years than any of the rest of us [in American Abstract Expressionism ]. Calder had worked in Paris quite a bit in the early days, though he did go to school here in New York at the Art Student's League... After my first year in college I had worked on the assembly line in the Studebaker plants up in Indiana..”

“"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.”

“The blue dusk ran between the streets; my love was winged within my mind;
It left to-day and yesterday and thrice a thousand years behind.
To-day was past and dead for me for from to-day my feet had run
Through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient Babylon.”

“Why make excuses close to the truth, especially when now I am presuming to try to grasp in my old age what I did not gain in my youth because my sins prevented me from making what I had read my own? But who will believe me, even though I should say it again? A young man, almost a beardless boy, I was taken captive before I knew what I should desire and what I should shun.”

“I listened to the pastors and elders in my churches. I listened to my mother who stayed home to raise my brother and me. I listened to my father, who worked hard every day in a blue collar job; a man who sacrificed his dreams to put food on the table and put his children through college and leave a pension to support my mom when he passed away. I listened to my grandfather, who was from Georgetown, South Carolina. Like my mom and dad, my grandfather never went to college, but he was a proud man, a smart man, and he filled my brother and me with big dreams about the lives we could lead. He taught me that my destiny had not been written before I was born – that my destiny was in my hands.”

“In Ceylon I had a black nurse who wet - nursed me.
Years later I was told by my father that she said of me:"This boy plenty belly, big stick."”

“I have to tell you it was the first time even after all these years of expecting my own death that i truly knew what it meant to die because with you gone there was nothing left for me to live for.”