Children S Authors

"Singh was always impressed at his wife’s ability to draw large conclusions from infinestimal pieces of evidence. She’d fit right into the Singapore police murder squad."

"Humanity was doomed, decided Singh, which made his job of hunting down individual murderers particularly pointless."

"In the foreground, right on the waterfront, was a massive pastel yellow arch – the Gateway of India. “It was built to welcome King George V when he visited India,” explained his well-briefed, Google-friendly wife. “They didn’t think a bunch of flowers would do?” asked [Inspector] Singh. “Anyway, it was only completed twelve years after the visit.” Singh grinned. That was the sort of managerial incompetence that he found amusing."

"There had been encroachments by Pakistani troops over the line of control in Kashmir. Editorials solemnly urged the government to adopt a firm stance. Right, thought [Inspector] Singh. Two nuclear powers adopting a ‘firm’ stance was definitely the right way forward."

"In a few minutes, they were whizzing past small boys who had the latest cricket scores written on bits of cardboard. They held up the information for passing traffic and the drivers exclaimed at the news – Sachin Tendulkar had scored a fifty – and threw coins at them in thanks. So much for avoiding the result of the game, thought Singh. This system was more efficient than subscribing for updates on a mobile phone."

"Global warming was to blame according to scientists and the government had promised tough climate goals. Next to the article was another one, lauding the Tata Nano, the ‘one lakh’ car. No one seemed inclined to point out the contradiction between reducing global warming and sticking a bunch of cheap cars on the road ... There was something to be said for the ‘no news is good news’ approach of the Singapore dailies. Certainly, an ordinary day’s worth of news in the Straits Times, tucked in between the advertisements for supermarket chains, cheap holidays and miraculous slimming treatments, didn’t look quite like this."

"Singh was distracted by a strong and unpleasant smell that suddenly pervaded the airplane. He sniffed cautiously, protruding nostril hairs quivering. It didn’t smell like burning fuel or melting plastic or any of those olfactory sensations that would have caused him to make a dash for the exits. He turned to Mrs. Singh who was reading the in-flight magazine with the disdain of one who preferred to Google her subjects rather than have them pre-selected by an editor. “What’s that stink?” he whispered. “India,” she answered succinctly and then turned her attention back to a gleaming picture of the Taj Mahal resplendent in its manicured gardens, its reflection shimmering in a lake ..."

"Mrs. Singh finally hove into view. “About bloody time,” he muttered. “These fellows have been trying to take our passports, our bags, our trolley – they’d have walked off with me balanced on their heads if you’d taken any longer.” “Strong but not that strong,” remarked Mrs. Singh, leading the way to the taxi rank."

"Women like her, conservative and narrow-minded, were quite willing to believe that someone arrested for pilfering was congenitally pre-disposed to commit more serious crimes, eventually and naturally culminating in murder. In her view, fixating on the evidence for an individual crime was just pedantic. Mind you, Singh had met high court judges with the same attitude. He wondered for a moment why his wife had such faith in the police force in the abstract and so little confidence in his role in it."

"He would avoid her relatives in the same way he’d always done – by sitting irascibly in a corner and allowing their waves of curiosity to wash over him."

"Her life had all the ingredients of a Bollywood movie except the happy ending."

"A mob is more than the sum of individuals. It is more like a single creature with many arms and legs, hydra-headed but working with one idea."

""He gives away a lot of money to charity and supports Sikh causes.” “Maybe we could persuade him that I’m a Sikh cause.”"

"“Eighty per cent of doctors in the United States are of Indian origin,” snapped Mrs. Singh, looking up from the computer for a moment to ensure that he was paying attention. “That can’t possibly be right,” protested Singh. “It says so right here,” said his wife, pointing a bony finger at the screen and basking in the blue light like an acolyte before a high priest. “Not everything you read on the Internet is true,” muttered Singh, addressing his remark to the skinny back in the flamboyant pink caftan."

"The apartment building was tall and modern and would not have looked out of place in Singapore. In Singh’s view, it was extremely dull. “I thought that these rich Indians lived in mansions with one lot of stairs going up and another coming down and dancing girls everywhere?” “You watch too much TV.”"

"The gods were fighting over her children but she could not seek the help of any of them. And she had so much choice. She had grown up a Buddhist, her ex-husband was alleged a Moslem when he died, her own sister was a Christian - so many options for salvation. [...] Chelsea would have settled for solace through prayer. But she did not believe that there was an invisible hand behind the farce that was her life's play. At the very least she did not believe in a benevolent God. [...] Surely it was better to lay the blame for the machinations of fate at the door of chance?"

"Rupert did not understand why the parasites in cities did not understand the most fundamental tenet of nature - that a parasite eventually kills its host. Did these people not know that if they continued to feed and spread and grow, with the tendrils of their greed wrapping themselves around their host, the day would come when it could no longer sustain them and when it died they would too?"

"In Singapore, house renovation had only one goal — to convey wealth. He had seen houses that appeared huge, with a vast amount of road frontage, only to pass by another day using another route and discover that the same house was narrower than a long boat."

"The act of speaking, the release from silence, invariably meant that the prisoner would say too much, give something away, let slip an honest truth in the midst of the self-justification. Inspector Singh, like a fine piano-tuner, could listen to these verbal outpourings and pick up those hints of expression or emotion that were off-key and those that rang true. And so he waited for Jasper Lee to open his mouth, and a door to the truth, at the same time."

"But these quiet people, in their animal skin clothes with their diet of sago, were not to be left alone to wander through the lush jungles, living off the land, leaving no mark when they moved on, teaching their children the secrets of the forest. The greed of others could not co-exist with the selflessness of the Penan with their gentle humour and generous hearts."

"Sometimes, if you want to protect something you care about, you have to take extreme steps."

"Now he was in a holding pen with various members of the Kuala Lumpur criminal fraternity and they scared him [...] They ranged from a Chinese gang member, whose dragon tattoo foraged up his arm and curled around his neck, to a large, [sic] Indian man with a jet-black moustache and pocked-marked face, brooding in a corner. The majority of his cellmates appeared from their accents to be Indonesians, part of the large contingent of illegal immigrants in Malaysia. [...] At least, he thought, the government should be proud that their efforts to integrate the various races in Malaysia into a cohesive society were bearing such fruit. It was a very multi-racial group that was penned in together."

"He suspected they did it not just because of their voracious appetite for tropical hardwoods and the money that it brought in, but because of a visceral fear that someday they might have to acknowledge that they were wrong. Everything they had sought and bought had not brought them happiness, let alone contentment. [...] It was better to destroy the potential source of such unpalatable truths than have them live to witness the lives of quiet desperation of their tormentors."

"The Penan do not have many possessions. They have lived for generations in the Borneo forests in harmony with their environment, taking what they need from the jungle, leaving no footprint but that of bare feet on muddy earth washed away with each rain. It was not difficult for them to regroup and move deeper into the forest. They would not be missed and traces of their ephemeral presence would soon be erased."

"And yet, the inspector thought, Kuala Lumpur had a certain something. It was difficult for him to put his finger on what it was exactly. There was a sense of freedom perhaps, of anarchy even, that Singapore so sorely lacked. Perhaps it was the lack of deference to authority, the physical space, the ability to take a step back and enjoy a moment of quiet that lent Kuala Lumpur its atmosphere."

"Singh could not help but think that, in a hospital, the proximity of death was best disguised — and the actual dead hidden. It was not conducive to the right frame of mind for recovery to have the morgue signposted for patients. It would be the medical equivalent of 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here'."

"Temples are places of worship, not war. We should never have let separatists hole up in our gurdwaras."

"“What are you trying to say?” “Well, she’s due to get married and she runs away from home…what else is one supposed to think?” “Are the Singapore police trained to leap to conclusions, Inspector?” Tanvir’s ironic remark was a little too close to the bone. Still, one did have to examine the obvious before indulging in colourful speculation. “Embellish your theory, Inspector,” said Tara Singh. His voice was as sharp as the knives with stiletto points that Singh sometimes found embedded in the chests of victims."

"Singaporeans were always adding to the list of reasons each one kept to hand, in case they met a Malaysian, of why it was so much better on the island than the peninsula. They ranged from law and order to cleanliness, from clean government to good schools, and always ended on the strength of the Singaporean economy. But in the end, the Malaysian would nod, as if to agree on the points made — and shrug to indicate that they wouldn't trade passports, not really."

"It's funny, I grew up in a happy family with loving parents, but I've killed off a lot of parents in these books. The orphan in children's literature, allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?' – it is about finding your place in the world."

"I don’t really feel like the gender of character is what causes someone to identify with them. It’s the situation they’re in, it’s the way they deal with danger, the way that they deal with fears. And so I feel like it’s a slightly larger question in terms of what makes us identify with someone."

"I could never imagine a movie being made from the way I had structured the book, it still feels miraculous that we made it this way without compromising the story, but everything has felt miraculous since I got that first phone call saying Martin Scorsese wants to make a movie out of 'Hugo.' I recognize how lucky I am."

"[T]here was absolutely no possibility of a successful resolution to the case he had just been handed. There never was when religion trumped rational behaviour and politics influenced police work."

"Buried six feet under, buried facing Mecca, burnt to cinders ... it does not matter. He is rotting in hell this very moment."

"He knew from his own experience in Singapore that the further up the ladder one got, the more the job was about politics and statistics than actually dealing with crime."

"It seemed, pondered the inspector, that no sooner did you give a man a car than he wanted to drive somewhere and do something."

"[S]o many languages were spoken in Malaysia that quite often the wheels of justice ground to a standstill for the lack of an interpreter who could restore the tower of babel to a court of law."

"Chelsea Liew! A ridiculous name - par for the course with the adoption of Western names by Singaporeans aiming to give themselves a cosmopolitan air. Unfortunately, they often picked the most improbable monikers. Inspector Singh had come across young Singaporeans revelling in first names like Mayfair and Rothmans."

"No respectable Sikh family would buy art merely for its aesthetic qualities."

"In any case, the idea that somehow liberals are responsible for bringing on right-wing authoritarianism is of a piece with the domestic abuser's refrain "Look what you made me do." Or, for that matter, with the idea that antisemitism would not exist if Jews did not provoke their own persecution."

"A document, recently released—“LVMPD Criminal Investigative Report of the 1 October Mass Casualty Shooting,” to give it its official name—offering the local-police-department summary of the Las Vegas gun massacre of last year... The report takes on the supposedly baffling question of Paddock’s motive, and what comes through is that—unless some astonishing new connection or fact appears in the future—his intention appears to have been purely nihilistic. Paddock wanted to kill a lot of people because he wanted to kill a lot of people. Feelings of frustration and insufficient power, the frequent ignition of such killings, may have moved him, too, and yet they seem to have been more unrooted than such feelings usually are among mass killers. He came from a troubled family, but had managed to acquire money, a girlfriend, an occupation. Basically, it seems to have been an item on his bucket list. He knew that the one thing he could do before he died was murder a lot of people. Why did he want to kill a lot of people? Because he wanted to kill a lot of people. So, he Googled any number of cheerful outdoor concerts, in California and Chicago and also in Las Vegas, and made reservations at hotels looking down on them, and kept buying weapons of mass murder, and finally, there he was, a little god of death."

"The same parents can raise a dreamy, reflective girl and a driven, competitive one—the job is not to nurse her nature but to help elicit the essential opposite: to help the dreamy one to be a little more driven, the competitive one to be a little more reflective. The one artisanal, teachable thing is outer conduct."

"Teaching kids to become something other than what they were born to be is probably impossible; teaching them to behave in ways that seem unnatural to them at the start is actually not that hard."

"As satirists have pointed out for millennia, civilized behavior is artificial and ridiculous: it means pretending to be glad to see people you aren’t glad to see, praising parties you wished you hadn’t gone to, thanking friends for presents you wish you hadn’t received. Training kids to feign a passion is the art of parenting. The passions they really have belong only to them."

"Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the flow within that green-and-white geometry."

"We disapprove of parental hovering not because it won’t pay off later—it might; it does!—but because it’s obnoxious now."

"What sustains us in any competition are the moments of interiority when the competition vanishes; what sustains us in any struggle are the moments when we forget the struggle."

"Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all."

"Strenuously competitive parents may indeed produce high-achieving grownups, but it’s in the nature of things that high-achieving adults are likely to become frustrated and embittered old people, once the rug is pulled out from under their occupation."

"Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once."