Top 74 Lanka Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Black is confusing. Where does the line start and stop with what is black and what isn't black? People that are mixed-race, or, imagine being from Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, people might say you're black but your features are so non-black, like you've got straight hair, you've got like a sharper nose, or such.

I love to travel with my family or my two best friends because I completely trust them. I forced my two best friends into learning to scuba dive with me in Sri Lanka - it was amazing but also hideous because we were learning in very difficult seas.

I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing because I knew them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali.

Basically, when I went to school in Sri Lanka from age five onward, the classes there were sometimes sorted into a hierarchy of your skin tone. So the fairer-skinned kids sat at the front row, and the darker-skinned kids sat at the back by the poor ones who played out in the street all day long.

I make a distinction between Buddhism with a Capital 'B' and buddhism with a small 'b'. Sri Lanka has the former, in which the state uses Buddhism as an instrument of power, so there are even Buddhists monks who say the Tamils should be eliminated. Thai Buddhists are not perfect either. Some Thai Buddhist monks have compromised with the kind and possess cars and other luxuries. In many Buddhist countries, the emphasis is on being goody-goody, which is not good enough. I am for buddhism with a small 'b' which is non-violent, practical and aims to eliminate the cause of suffering.

I think East Asian countries, I think they're very fortunate to have Buddhism survive as a strong influence because right from the time when Buddha himself, 2,500 years ago, made the point about the importance of education, and the word "Buddha" also means enlighten[ed] or educated. So all the Buddhist countries, not only Japan and Korea and China and Hong Kong and Thailand but also even Burma and Sri Lanka, had a higher level of education.

Strange to wake-up this morning as a former ODI cricketer, but it's been a great honour and privilege playing for Sri Lanka during the past 15 years. At the end of the day, I am very fortunate to have enjoyed a long career playing with and against some great players. Thanks for all the encouragement and support over the years.

I'm just so grateful for the 10 years that I had in Sri Lanka when it was in the middle of a war and I was getting shot at, because now and again I remember glimpses of those times, and I just go, 'Wow, I'll never, ever see that again in my life. And I'm never gonna feel that, and I'm never gonna feel for a human being like that.'

There's always a joy in newness as a painter, and in sub-Saharan Africa, I encountered different realities with regard to light and how it bounces across the skin. The way that blues and purples come into play. In India and Sri Lanka, it was no different. It became a moment in which I had an opportunity to learn as a painter how to create the body in full form, and that's a very material and aesthetic thing. This is not conceptual. It's all an abstraction.

Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.

It is nice that we finished the game today. At the end we finished the series with a convincing victory against Bangladesh. We came here without some key players but I must say our young players showed a lot of characters in the series which will help Sri Lanka cricket in the future.

I'd spent thirty years visiting the Dalai Lama, and twenty years as a journalist going to difficult places, war zones and revolutions from North Korea to Haiti and Beirut to Sri Lanka, and the question came up: What does this man have to offer to this world which seems so torn up and so attached to conflict?

Space is about 100 kilometers away. That’s far away—I wouldn’t want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn’t that far away. If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

I've noticed that the more flooding there is, the more bullshit gets talked. I mean it was very noticeable in the Asian tsumai. It happened around Christmas-New Year. The Muslims of Sri Lanka said 'We knew this would happen because the Christians were using alcohol for their Christmas celebrations.' The Buddhists said 'We knew this would happen because of the horrible Muslim slaughter practices.' It's amazing to see how apocalypse or catastrophe makes people behave primitively.