32 Quotes by Sunil Yapa

Gandhi was the man that freed a nation, but it was Nehru – a man of compromise – that built it. It was Gandhi who freed a people; but it was Nehru – a politician – who gave them jobs. Which one should he choose? His doubts weighed against his duty. You cannot have prosperity without a nation of your own. And yet, what good is freedom if you are shackled to your hunger by chains as thick as any ever worn by slaves?

Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.

There where they learned that courage is not the ability to face your fear, heroically, once, but is the strength to do it day after day. Night after night. Faith without end. Love without border.

What we require of others so that we may live our lives of easy convenience. Dad, there are people who work all day every day for thirty years assembling the three wires that make a microwave timer beep. What are we supposed to think of this? How do they survive it? Why do we ask them to?

One of the important things for me is that my father is from Sri Lanka. But even more importantly, he was a consultant for the World Bank.

I think we sometimes forget that we have so many other places to create change. My dad taught me this, but the political is one spot to make change. But so is writing a book.

Poverty is just a word. I mean, how do you dismantle capitalism? It's through small actions. It's through breaking down poverty as a lived experience of not enough food, of your health not being good. So those are things that we can actually work on without ever having to call a politician.

I consider myself a brown American or a man of color before I would say Sri Lankan, to be honest. I didn't grow up there. There was a pretty brutal civil war there from 1983 until 2009. So we weren't able to go back very much. I've gone back as an adult. But I grew up in Pennsylvania.

I remember so clearly from when I was five years old, my mom and dad arguing over - not over whether it was better, but whether it was proper or whether it was correct to eat with a fork or to eat with your hands, like we do in Sri Lanka. Proper. Like, what is the correct way to eat?