Aslam O 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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