Cutting for Stone Quotes

But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say, Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing.

I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.

We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.

All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would be left of me?

Worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life, and faith is the oil.

Ghosh trusted me to do whatever it is I would choose to do. That, too, is love. He'd been dead more than a quarter century and he was still teaching me about the trust that comes only from true love.

Her skills were so rare, so needed for the poorest of the poor, and even at times in the royal palace, that she felt valued. Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

The ritual of immigration and baggage claim at Kennedy Airport went by so quickly that I wondered if I'd missed it. Where were the armed soldiers? The dogs? The long lines? The body searches? Where were the tables where your luggage was laid open and a knife taken to the lining?

Ghosh sighed. "I hope one day you see this as clearly as I did in Kerchele. The key to your happiness is to own your own slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only your actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny."

You can’t set out to achieve your goals without a little madness.

When she walked away I felt the weight of what she left unsaid. I wanted to call after her, Ma! You have it all wrong. But just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you.