Quotes from Charles Allen

Creativity is the essence of fencing.

You know what they say about consultants, don't you? They know all the moves in the Kama Sutra but don't know any women.

There is at least one important work to be done that will not be done unless you do it.

No person ever really lives until he has found something worth dying for.

However, the most striking evidence of Brahmanical hostility towards Buddhism comes in the form of silence: the way in which India's Buddhist history, extending over large parts of the country and lasting for many centuries, was excised from the historical record.

who feared God, but not death … who thought none below him but the base and unjust, none above him but the wise and virtuous'.

This travelling was never about gaining merit or the absolution of sins. It was always the journey that mattered, and what these travels could tell me about the country and its history – a history so alluring, so epic as to keep drawing me back. There is so damn much of it, and so much still unexamined, still disputed, still buried and waiting to be brought back into the light.

As they approached Dhauli the elephant refused to go forward; nothing that Mark or the mahout did could persuade her to cross the open ground in front of them. Only then did Mark learn that they had come to the Kalinga battlefield, on which hundreds of war elephants are said to have died.

The purpose of the appeal was to open a subscription list by which signatories pledged themselves to support the cost of printing a limited edition, of which they themselves would be entitled to one or more copies, depending on the amount pledged. This was the usual means at the time [1836] of enabling the publication of an expensive book…