Nadeem Aslam Quotes & Sayings

God is just a name for our wonder. — Nadeem Aslam

There are times in this life when a person must do or say things he doesn't want to. Human beings and chains, it is the oldest acquaintanceship in the world. — Nadeem Aslam

History is the third parent. — Nadeem Aslam

All those who love know exactly the limit they're prepared to go to. They know exactly what is required. — Nadeem Aslam

I don't feel old. I just feel like someone young who has something wrong with him. — Nadeem Aslam

Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble. — Nadeem Aslam

Basie would lie on the mattress and talk endlessly, sometimes drinking from a bottle of Murree's whisky he'd bring with him, bought from one of the clandestine bars in Heer where there were locked cages for female drinkers, to prevent them from being sexually assaulted by the inebriated male clientele, as well as to stop the drunk women from killing every man in sight. — Nadeem Aslam

The bigger the sin, the rarer and more expensive the bird that is needed to erase it. Is that how the bird pardoner conducts his business? A sparrow for a small deception, but a paradise flycatcher and a monal pheasant for allowing a doubt about His existence to enter the mind. — Nadeem Aslam

But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again - their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system. — Nadeem Aslam

She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having renounced dealings with all words except that one, never utters another, in any circumstance ... The sentence enters her mind from a book she had been looking at earlier. Her gaze is drifting across the sky where the moon sits in a great cold ring as she recalls more and more words. Only one thing matters, only one word. If we speak, it is because we have not found that thing, nor shall find it. — Nadeem Aslam

Nothing is an accident: it's always someone's fault; perhaps-but no one teaches us how to live with our mistakes. Everyone is isolated, alone with his or her anguish and guilt, and too penetrating a question can mean people are not able to face one another the next day. — Nadeem Aslam

Tell me,' the man leans forward ans says, 'have you heard of a lady called Madeleine? No? In 1996, this lady named Albright Madeleine, the US ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on television how she felt about the fact that five hundred thousand Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions? Do you know what she said? She said that it was "a very hard choice" but "we think the price is worth it". These are her exact words. How do you feel about that?
'How do you think I feel about that? And I would take your love for children more seriously if you didn't have children cleaning your floors. — Nadeem Aslam

All great artists know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings. — Nadeem Aslam

Women joked amongst themselves: 'Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It's for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past- "you were born and then I married you"- but men are fools. — Nadeem Aslam

On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step — Nadeem Aslam

You have spent your whole life believing such untrue things. Don't you know how alone you are, David? We are most alone when we are with the myths. — Nadeem Aslam

The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important. — Nadeem Aslam

She thought of the boy thrown into the cauldron of war, the girl beset by various bigotries, her life in danger, and saw how unjust it all was, her fury limitless for a few moments. And she felt a sense of shame, something akin to accusation from them towards her and her generation, for not having constructed a better world to welcome and contain their beauty, to house their spirit. - — Nadeem Aslam

The West wants unconditional love; failing that, unconditional surrender. — Nadeem Aslam

Not even God can change the past. — Nadeem Aslam

In some respects, grief for the lost and missing is worse than grief for the dead, and sometimes just for a fraction of a second its intensity makes her wish Mikal would cease to exist, so she wouldn't have to wonder if she will ever see him again. — Nadeem Aslam

This is among the few things that can be said about love with any confidence. It is small enough to be contained within the heart but, pull thin, it would drape the entire world. — Nadeem Aslam

We are not men of hate, but we must be men of justice. — Nadeem Aslam

Paper is the strongest material in the world. Things under which a mountain will crumble, you can place on paper and it will hold: beauty at its most intense; love at its fiercest; the greatest grief; the greatest rage. — Nadeem Aslam

How easy it is to create ghosts, he thinks as he begins to die a minute later, feeling his mind closing chamber by chamber, the memory of Naheed contained in each one. And despite it all it means much to have been loved. Just before the world vanishes, a hope surfaces in him that this wasn't necessarily everything, that he will return somehow.
His arm rises, remembering when it used to be a wing. — Nadeem Aslam

He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn was supposed to live in the scent of the acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly world. — Nadeem Aslam

There are no innocent people in a guilty nation. — Nadeem Aslam

If love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness, then he had loved Mikal since they were both ten years old. — Nadeem Aslam

As a child he used to wonder why Eve was taken from Adam's rib. Now, at the other end of his life, these decades later, he knows it was because the rib is close to the heart. — Nadeem Aslam

There is nothing that torments Satan more than the sight of a faithful in prayer. — Nadeem Aslam

From the book he carefully tears out several maps, and in this light Afghanistan's mountains and hills and restlessly branching corridors of rock appear as though the pages are crumpled up, and there is a momentary wish in him to smooth them down. Laser-guided bombs are falling onto the pages in his hands, missiles summoned from the Arabian Sea, from American warships that are as long as the Empire State Building is tall. — Nadeem Aslam

Wolves exhibiting strange behaviour
caught in traps and thrashing about, injured by other creatures or by bullets, pups suffering from epilepsy
are attacked and killed by their pack members. But here everyone is human and must try to understand each other's mystery. Each other's pain. — Nadeem Aslam

But have you ever heard a story in which the evil person triumphs at the end?"
The boy thought for a while before replying.
"No," he said, "but before they lose, they harm the good people. That is what I am afraid of. — Nadeem Aslam

Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world. — Nadeem Aslam

The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war. — Nadeem Aslam

If I take dust in my hand and ask you if that is all the dust there is, you will answer that dust is everywhere on earth. More specks than can ever be numbered. So I can give you a handful of truth only. Besides this there are other truths. More than can ever be numbered. — Nadeem Aslam

Her mind is a haunted house. — Nadeem Aslam

A daughter, a wife, a grandson,' You could say this place took away all I had. I could easily appear to be one of those unfortunate white men you hear about, who thought too lovingly of the other races and civilization of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up a home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake. His life smashed to pieces by the barbarians surrounding him. — Nadeem Aslam

The soles of his shoes are worn the way the edges of erasers become rounded with use. As though he walks around correcting his mistakes. — Nadeem Aslam

Modesty and decency dwell in the mind, not in a burka. — Nadeem Aslam

He would drift through the house in search of the coolest spot to read through the long summer afternoons that had a touch of eternity to them, altering the arrangement of his limbs as much for comfort as for the fear that his undisturbed shadow would leave a stain on the wall. — Nadeem Aslam

To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there. — Nadeem Aslam

The neighbourhood is a place of ... intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds. — Nadeem Aslam

The sky is a blue so clean it verges on joy. — Nadeem Aslam

How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display. — Nadeem Aslam

The street is still shut as we step into the molten-gold atmosphere of mid-afternoon. The houses face each other across the passages like armies of an ancient Arabian battlefield ... .We narrow our eyes against the glare. Beating their wings, the birds too are leaving the trees for the mosque. The leaves hang like limp hands from the branches. We try to think of the cool blue river and, turning around, glance towards where the river wets the horizon. But the river, too, seems helpless before the insanity of the sun, lying like an exhausted lizard at the end of the street — Nadeem Aslam

Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself. — Nadeem Aslam

Only twenty - nine years in the entire human history had been without warfare, and now here he was too, travelling between the episodes of a rapacious civil war. — Nadeem Aslam

We are warriors of Allah."
"You are thugs with Korans. — Nadeem Aslam

The forgiveness of the weak is the air you strong ones breath, David. Didn't you know? You don't see it but you felt it just then. They allow you to go on living. — Nadeem Aslam

What strange times are these," says Tara as they wend their way through the dead to safety, "when Muslims must fear other Muslims. — Nadeem Aslam

We walk past the house with the blue door. It has been made clear to us that we are to walk quietly by this house, never accept an invitation to step inside, never return the smile of the woman of the house, nor glance at the old man who sometimes looks out of the upstairs window; at our peril are we to be tempted by the flowers lying under the eaves, or by the figs that the storms shake loose. But our shadows dare each other. One of them is foolish enough to climb on to the doorstep but is pulled away just before it can reach the door bell. — Nadeem Aslam

Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness. — Nadeem Aslam

Even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare. It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war-how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where wheat was grown. — Nadeem Aslam

As a writer, my homeland is the desk where I work. — Nadeem Aslam

When a coin is minted, the devil kisses it. — Nadeem Aslam

Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery. But no nation should ever require its citizens to be that brave. — Nadeem Aslam

Wounds are said to emit light under certain conditions - touch them and the brightness will stay on the hands - and as candles burn Rohan thinks of each flame as an injury somewhere in his house. — Nadeem Aslam

The young everywhere ... would prefer to live in houses that consist only of doors. — Nadeem Aslam

During the school holidays he would approach the bookcase in the pink room and stand before it, his hand alighting on this or that volume with the arbitrariness of a moth, half deciding on something before sliding it back in place and moving on, as though experimenting with the keys of a piano, all briefly opened books eager to engage his eye, each flickeringly glimpsed paragraph enticing him hurriedly with its secret, and having made his choice he would drift through the house in search of the coolest spot to read through the long summer afternoons that had a touch of eternity to them, altering the arrangement of his limbs as much for comfort as for fear that his undisturbed shadows would leave a stain on the wall. — Nadeem Aslam

A lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it. — Nadeem Aslam