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

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.

People bring to what they see and feel, the inner weather of their souls and complexion of their minds.

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.

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.

History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward.