N.A. Ratnayake > Recent Status Updates

"Children seldom are able to realize that death will come to them personally. One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die... and accepts his sentence undismayed."

"It is as if someone were to set up what had been knocked down, or to point out the way to one who had got lost, or to bring an oil-lamp into a dark place so that those with eyes could see what was there."

"There, sitting under hundreds of thousands of tons of stone, they would watch their instruments until morning, listening to their earphones ping with the sound of particles born in the belly of dying stars."

"And so, with mind concentrated, purified and cleansed, unblemished, and having gained imperturbability, he directs and inclines his mind towards knowing and seeing. And he knows: 'This is my body material, made up from the four great elements, born of mother and father, fed on rice and gruel, impermanent, liable to be injured and abraded, broken and destroyed, and this is my consciousness which is bound to it." S2

"I lie awake each night in my cheap room with the window open to the pounding of the dredge-hammer sounding like the booming of this vile city's heart, the distant susurration of the surf its wet breathing. Tonight I listen to the city breathe and cannot help but give it the flayed face of the murdered man."