I really can’t hate more than 5 or 10 years. Wouldn’t it be terrible to be always burdened with those primary emotions you had at one time?

A family is a burial mound of its own doings and sayings...

Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging...

No single crisis shapes a generation; but a succession of events, each one bringing its shaping blows to bear...

The rice bowl is to me the most valid reason in the world for doing anything. A piece of one’s soul to the multitudes in return for rice and wine does not seem to me a sacrilege.

Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did.

This is Malaya. Everything takes a long, a very long time, in Malaya. Things get done, occasionally, but more often they don’t, and the more in a hurry you are, the quicker you break down.

Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.

There is nothing in the world stronger than gentleness.

All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.