'Didier,' Ulla sighed, mouthing his name with a smile of exquisite sweetness, 'have I told you to get fucked yet?' ¶ 'No!' he laughed, 'But I forgive you for the lapse. Between us, my darling, such things are always implied, and understood.'

'So ... when will it be the time for the getting on the train?' ¶ 'I think ... a little bit almost quite very soon, and not long.'

There was pride in his face, but he was sad, and tired, and worried. It took me a long time to realise that all farmers, everywhere, are just as tired, worried, proud, and sad: that the soil you turn and the seed you sow are all you really have, when you live and work the Earth. And sometimes, much too often, there's nothing more than that—the silent, secret, heartbreaking joy God puts into things that bloom and grow—to help you face the fear of hunger and the dread of evil.

It's a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust.

He was one of thousands of health professionals working in the city, with careers as distinguished in what they denied themselves as in what they achieved every working day.

Good doctors have at least three things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen, and they're very tired.

Prison pulls the masks away from men. You can't hide what you are, in prison. You can't pretend to be tough. You are, or you're not, and everyone knows it.

'We are the not-people,' Prabaker said happily, 'And these are the not-houses, where we are not-living.'

I wrapped the silence around myself like a scarf, and stared past her softly sculptured profile to the haphazard beauty of the street.

It's one of the five hundred things I love about Indians: if they like you, they do it quickly, and not by half.

Some women cry easily. The tears fall as gently as fragrant raindrops in a sun-shower; and leave the face clear and clean and almost radiant. Other women cry hard, and all the loveliness in them collapses in the agony of it.

'The Holy Koran tells us that all things in the universe are related, one to another, and that even opposites are united in some way. I think that there are two points about suffering that we should remember, and they have to do with pleasure and pain. The first is this: that pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is also possible to suffer without feeling pain.'

'I think that when we learn from pain—for example, that fire burns and is dangerous—it is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people. If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle. We do not learn from it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God.'

When we're young, we think that suffering is something that's done to us. When we get older—when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another—we know that real suffering is measured by what's taken away from us.

As exhaustion finally claimed me, submerging my doubts and confusions, the shrewd clarity of near-sleep suddenly showed me what it was that those new friends—Khaderbhai, Karla, Abdullah, Prabaker, and all the others—had in common. They were all, we were all, strangers to the city. None of us were born there. All of us were refugees, survivors, pitched up on the shores of the island city. If there was a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed.

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have—to hold on tight until the dawn.

On the golden crescent, across the small bay, apartment towers for the rich stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, all the way to the embassy district at the Point. In the large courtyards and recreation areas of those towers, the wealthy walked and took the air. Seen from the distant slum, the white shirts of the men and colourful saris of the women were like so many beads threaded by a meditating mind on the black strings of asphalt paths.

I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.

Didier, trying to warn me, trying to help me or save me, perhaps, had said once that nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn't meant to be.

'We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime.'

Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn't, let ourselves become.

it's impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.

After a bout of bartering that invoked an august assembly of deities from at least three religions, and incorporated spirited, carnal references to the sisters of our respective friends and acquaintances, a dealer agreed to hire out an Enfield Bullet motorcycle for a reasonable rate.

Renowned for its idiosyncratic handling as much as for its reliability and durability, the Bullet was a bike that demanded a relationship with its rider. That relationship involved tolerance, patience, and understanding on the part of the rider. In exchange, the Bullet provided the kind of soaring, celestial, wind-weaving pleasure that birds must know, punctuated by not infrequent near-death experiences.

As I rode the wind, a week after Khader's little lecture on ethics, weaving the bike through ancient-modern traffic beneath a darkening, portentous rumble of clouds, those words echoed in my mind. The wrong thing, for the right reasons. I rode on and, even when I stopped thinking about Khader's lesson, those words still murmured in the little grey daydream-space where memory meets inspiration. I know now that the words were like a mantra, and that my instinct—fate's whisper in the dark—was trying to warn me of something by repeating them. The wrong thing ... for the right reasons.

No-one else in Khaderbhai's network seemed to share my sense of outrage or my shame. There's probably no single group of citizens who are more cynical about politics and politicians than professional criminals. In their view, all politicians are ruthless and corrupt, and all political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. And in time, and in a sense, I began to share their view because I knew the experience in which it was grounded. Prison had given us an intimate acquaintance with human-rights violations, and every day the courts confirmed what we'd learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.

The effect, no matter how skillfully achieved, is always born in the artist's intuition. And intuition can't be taught.

The tall Iranian entered silently, dressed in black like a thing made from the night itself.

Even if we never pity them at any other time, and in any other way, we should pity the dead when we look at them, and touch them. Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer. And dead men demand prayers. The silent heart, the tumbled nave of the chest unbreathing, and the guttered candles of the eyes—they summon our prayers. Each dead man is a temple of ruins, and when our eyes walk there we should pity, we should pray.

You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.

'Fanaticism is the opposite of love,' I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai's lectures. 'A wise man once told me—he's a Muslim, by the way—that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. I agree with him, and I feel the same way. I also agree with Winston Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won't change his mind and can't change the subject.'

Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

Cold turkey off heroin is life with the skin torn away.

Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.

Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women.

When you know you're going to die, there's no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom.

I passed several rooms that were burned. In one of them, the fire had been so fierce that the floor was missing, and the charred bearers showed through the gaps like the ribs of some great animal's remains.

Her hands, as limp and expressionless as her slack mouth, lay in her lap like things washed up on a deserted shore.

'The last time I went there, he was working on this new idea. He was filling empty packaging with plaster, using the bubble packs that used to have toys in them, you know, and the foam boxes you get packed around a new T.V. set. He calls them negative spaces. He uses them like a mould, and he makes a sculpture out of them. He had a hundred things there—shapes made out of egg cartons, and the blister-pack that a new toothbrush came in, and the empty package that had a set of headphones in it.' ¶ I turned to look at her. The sky in her eyes held tiny storms. Her lips, embossed with secret thoughts, were swollen to the truth she was trying to tell me. ¶ 'I walked around there, in his studio, you know, looking at all these white sculptures, and I thought, that's what I am. That's what I've always been. All my life. Negative space. Always waiting for someone, or something, or some kind of real feeling to fill me up and give me a reason...'

I rode the elevator down to the foyer alone with the crowd of my mirror selves: beside and behind me, still and silent, not one of them was able to meet my eye.

The word mafia comes from the Sicilian word for bragging. And if you ask any serious man who commits serious crimes for a living, he'll tell you it's just that—the boasting, the pride—that gets most of us in the end. But we never learn.

Money stinks. A stack of new money smells of ink and acid and bleach like the fingerprinting room in a city police station. Old money, vexed with hope and coveting, smells stale like dead flowers kept too long between the pages of a cheap novel.

Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one that you do.

And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.

'Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting,' she murmured.

Children slept on shoulders, their unwilled arms and legs hanging limp as wet washing on a line.