Kumari de Silva

“Her husband sat silently while she talked, his hands fisted together, his half-smile set in concrete; he looked wisely down at the tablecloth. So this is marriage, I thought: this shared tedium, this twitchiness, and those little powdery runnels forming to the sides of the nose.”
― Margaret Atwood

“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
― Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings

“I can hear people in American society saying, "Oh, you just like that subservient kind of woman in Asia who waits on her man hand and foot." Nothing could be more of a misconception. Many Asian women I've met, surely the most interesting ones. . . have strengths of character that most of us in America - male or female-simply lack.”
― Richard Terrill, Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir

“I'm not a liberal, or a conservative, or a gradualist, or a monk, or an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and that's all...”
― Anton Chekhov