An economically peaceful and prosperous Sri Lanka is the dream of youth of the nation. My message for the youth is to collectively work for an inclusively developed Sri Lanka.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
Be careful about Burma. Most people cannot remember whether it was Siam and has become Thailand, or whether it is now part of Malaysia and should be called Sri Lanka.
Alexander Cockburn
I've definitely grown into the job after that difficult first Test against Pakistan. I'd been captain for the Sri Lanka one-dayers, which hadn't gone well, and all the talk was that I only had that one Test as captain.
Andrew Strauss
I almost always do things that I like, in some form or fashion. Every once in awhile that means that I don't think the script is any good and I don't have any trust in the people, but the film is shooting in Sri Lanka, or somewhere like that, so I'm going.
Billy Campbell
I was born in Sri Lanka.
Chamath Palihapitiya
My mom was a nurse, and my dad worked in the Health Ministry as a civil servant. When I was 6 years old, my dad got a job at the Sri Lankan High Commission in Canada, so we moved there.
Many instances of persecution and killing have occurred in countries with atrocious human rights records such as Sri Lanka, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
David Suzuki
I can make a joke pointing out that David Cameron told off Sri Lanka for human rights abuses committed with weapons Britain sold it - like Ronald McDonald calling you a fat bastard.
Frankie Boyle
I took a 51 day trip through Asia; 12 countries and 26 cities. I traveled for 51 days. So, it was everywhere from Sri Lanka and that all the way to Japan, where we ended it.
Hanya Yanagihara
The first time I joined the gym was during the Miss Sri Lanka pageant in 2006. Then, I went for the Miss Universe contest where I was exposed to girls who were very fit for their age. They could have joined the Olympics. They were doing crazy exercises.
Jacqueline Fernandez
I am passionate about spreading awareness about Sri Lankan food.
I'd love to venture out into some international work. I would like to do some work in Sri Lanka as well.
When I first came to India from Sri Lanka, people were surprised to see my toned arms. I had come right after the Miss Universe pageant.
I have a restaurant in Sri Lanka, and I feel keen to open up something here in Mumbai and bring Sri Lankan food here in India. I feel we have so much in common, but we have a different cuisine, and I am sure people will enjoy here.
Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.
James Buchan
I discovered that Thailand was one of those countries, like Sri Lanka and India, where memory of past lives used to be commonplace. Go back a few generations, and you find people talking about earlier lives with total certainty.
John Burdett
I played in Sri Lanka, so I know how hard it is to come here and win. The weather is baking hot and the conditions are alien to English cricketers.
Jonathan Agnew
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.
Julia Sawalha
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.
M.I.A.
I don't support terrorism and never have. As a Sri Lankan that fled war and bombings, my music is the voice of the civilian refugee.
I was shot at for being a Tamil in Sri Lanka, and then, everyone was calling me a Paki in London, and I'm not even Pakistani.
Sri Lanka is an island off the coast of India. There's two ethnicities there; one the Sinhalese, which is the majority and the government, and the minority, who are the Tamils. That's where I'm from. And my lifetime sort of began there; I spent 10 years, and I was there during when the war started and fled as a refugee to England.
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.'
My giving birth was nothing when I think about all the people in Sri Lanka that have to give birth in a concentration camp.
The fact that television and tourism have made the whole world accessible has created the illusion that we enjoy intimate knowledge of other places, when we barely scratch their surface. For the vast majority, the knowledge of Thailand or Sri Lanka acquired through tourism consists of little more than the whereabouts of the beach.
That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.
I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
A lot of the Indian supporters would have been born in Birmingham, have Birmingham accents. It is my home city as well. Second, third generations from the sub-continent still support India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
I enjoy India whenever I go and Sri Lankans are overwhelmingly friendly.
A few countries like Sri Lanka and Honduras have led the way in slashing maternal mortality.
I'm a doer, and whether it was the tsunami in Sri Lanka or the earthquake in Indonesia, I was always saying, 'I should be there; I should be helping out.'
My grandfather, or Nana Ji, as we called him, was a family legend. Amarnath Vidyalankar spent his life fighting for India's independence, which included spending four years in prison in Mahatma Gandhi's movement. I still remember the conversations we had together, many of them while playing chess.
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.
Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.
Sri Lanka is a part of my background: it's not where I live, but it's what I want to explore. And I find it works very well to explore through fiction.
When I was growing up, I don't think I knew any other child who had been out of Sri Lanka.
My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.
Whether we live in Sri Lanka or Malaysia or India, the U.K. or the U.S., we face similar issues of understanding, remembering the past that has made us and seeing the future we want.
I probably felt most out of place as a young kid growing up in Sri Lanka. My mental world was somewhere else, partly because of reading and daydreaming.
Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.
In London, I discovered a peculiar building by Holland Park where the globe was shrunk to fit a British perspective, but which had a library with Sri Lankan books I had never seen before.
The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.
Actually, the reason I'm a huge Arsenal fan is because when my dad moved over from Sri Lanka, he lived in north London and fell in love with Arsenal. Then he moved to East Grinstead and bought a pub, which he turned into an Arsenal pub.
Mum came to Crawley from Sri Lanka at 19 after marrying my dad. Later, Dad had financial problems and they split for a while.
My parents are super westernized. My mom listens to western music, my dad was like a pub landlord so he properly embraced English life. But the truth is they both came from tiny villages in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka's interpretation of western cuisine is pretty diabolical. Sri Lankan food itself is ace, however, and they bloody love a buffet. Even if you go to a basic-looking cafe, they can knock up four or five different curries for you very quickly.
I'm not suggesting I met a significant enough number of them to constitute a robust sample size, but I am saying that my general impression of Sri Lankans is that they are friendly, chatty and hospitable people.
Sri Lankan wickets may not be conducive for fast bowling, but it doesn't mean that the quicks can't get wickets there.
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.
Malaysians talk with Mauritians, Arabs with Australians, South Africans with Sri Lankans, and Iranians with Indonesians. The Indian Ocean serves as both a sea separating them and a bridge linking them together.
