“I would ask, “Do you ride a bike?” I love everything about the machine – the sensation of the tyres on the road, the mobility – and I love the fact that you have this intimate relationship with the elements, and the landscape.”

A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children’s speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie. Children have been treated. as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers.

The world of sexual abuse is quintessentiall y secret. It is the perfect crime.

In the context of the great debates about identity politics – are you gay or straight, nationalist or republican, British or English and so on.

Be prepared to be enlightened, enraged, amused, engaged, and above all provoked.

Children’s bodies aren’t like automobiles with the assailant’s fingerprints lingering on the wheel.

The spirit of advaita is not to keep away from anything, but to keep in tune with everything

Nobody ever died of discomfort, yet living in the name of comfort has killed more ideas, more opportunities, more actions, and more growth than everything else combined. Comfort kills!

The more you learn about everything, the more you learn that everything’s fixed not in your favour.

Trust yourself and in the universe that everything will work out in the end.

Perfect love will never want the preeminence in everything, it will never want to take the place of another, it will always be willing to take the back seat.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

When doing everything according to indications, although things may not turn out agreeably to indication, we should not change to another while the original appearances remain.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.