Hijau adalah warna yang indah. Warna Islam. Warna kesukaanku.

At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.

Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.

For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each...

…I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. […] It is important in life to conclude things properly. Only then...

Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of...

I don’t mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are...

I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and...

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

Afterwards, when it’s all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?

How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that...

Stories–individual stories, family stories, national stories–are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them – and then they leap....

I was determined to move forward.

I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very...

Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love.I still cannot understand how he could abandon me...

For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks...

Isn’t telling about something–using words, English or Japanese–already something of an invention? Isn’t just looking upon this world already something of an invention? The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we...

And so, when she heard if Hare Krishnas, she didn’t hear right. She heard “Hairless Christians”, and that is what they were to her for many years. When I corrected her, I told her in...

These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy…walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, ‘Business as usual.’ But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a...

You see, the penis, it’s so graceless, wouldn’t you agree? When it’s cold and shrivelled up, it looks like W.H. Auden in his old age; when it’s hot, it flops and dangles about in a...

Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious

…he found it where he should have looked first, on the Internet, which is a net indeed, one that can be cast further than the eye can see and be retrieved no matter how heavy...

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed...

What a thing to acknowledge in your heart! To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and...

Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.

Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we...

Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body.

Even when God seemed to have abandoned me, he was watching. Even when he seemed indifferent to my suffering, he was watching. And when I was beyond all hope of saving, he gave me rest....

Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them…it is a fact commonly known in...

My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.

I couldn’t get Him out of my head. Still can’t. I spent three solid days thinking about Him. The more He bothered me, the less I coul forget Him. And the more I learned about...

The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?Doesn’t that make life a story?

Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

And what of my extended family-birds, beasts, and reptiles? They too have drowned. Every single thing I value in life has been destroyed. And I am allowed no explanation? I am to suffer hell without...

Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?

Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love.

Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.

As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.

Religion is more than rite and ritual.

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

Come aboard if your destination is oblivion – it should be our next stop.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil...

Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don’t feel the pain of others because they haven’t imaginatively got under...