Haider Quotes & Sayings

As I gather my thoughts here in order to get to the point, I am reminded of a joke Zafar made when he was still in banking. I say joke, but Zafar was always rather serious about banking and often talked about accountability, as he called it. This stuff is so esoteric, he once said, that the only people who understand it are in the business. What about regulators? I asked. Regulators, he replied, have one eye on the revolving door. Academics make money teaching traders their latest research, and politicians don't know their arses from their elbows. Can you imagine the people on a march against finance? The guy on a megaphone shouting: What do we want? And everyone answering: Specific curbs on short selling in certain circumstances. When do we want it? In phases and at appropriate times. That's the joke. It was funny at the time. — Zia Haider Rahman

destruction. Turning to God can save your life, but, in the process, it can annihilate your soul. — Zia Haider Rahman

No sight better expresses the politics of aid, the dynamics of the West and the developing countries, than the image of children, happy or in need. — Zia Haider Rahman

You see, calling things by their proper names is the beginning of wisdom. That's a Chinese proverb and they invented writing. The wisdom, in case you're wondering, is that when you get names right, you narrow the gap between you and the thing. — Zia Haider Rahman

I am too much of an imitator to be a true writer. — Zia Haider Rahman

Clothes should never be decoration ... whe n someone feels at peace with the clothes, they feel more seductive, more desirable, more sensual, more everything. — Haider Ackermann

At every stage, the world that breaks in through our senses struggles to find a footing in our brains. We might liken memories to the messages recorded on tape, but we mistake the message for the medium, or the other way round, for memory is the tape itself. When I listen to my memories now, I believe that all they tell me are the stories about themselves. — Zia Haider Rahman

My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you're made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It's only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. It's the strangest thing, this idea in quantum physics, and yet somehow unsurprising when you consider it as a metaphor. It's when the thing interacts that its properties are revealed, even resolved. — Zia Haider Rahman

In Bilaath, I said. Bilaath, or Vilayet as it has otherwise been transcribed into English, derives from Persian and Ottoman Turkish, in which the word meant governorate or district. In Bengali, the word is used to refer to Britain. In fact, one English colloquial name for Britain, Blighty, somewhat archaic these days and mainly reserved for comedy, is derived from the word Bilaath, which was current in India in the time of the British Raj. — Zia Haider Rahman

Never stop challenging yourself! Never loose enthusiasm! — Haider Ackermann

As I reached the highest step, I turned. Spread along the platform was a mass of bobbing black hair like a long wave of silk. Suddenly I felt the first stirrings of what I would later come to recognize as kinship, a feeling that alarmed me, a sense that I was of a piece with a group of people for the most basic reasons, simple to the senses and irrational. — Zia Haider Rahman

Afghanistan doesn't have the oil of the Khazars, he said, and we're not ready to prostitute our women like the Thais. Unlike the Westerner's, ours is not a spiritual poverty but a material one. When our needs in that area are met, we will not have the dilemma or crisis of Western man. — Zia Haider Rahman

Our memories do not visit us in chronology, and the story we form by joining up the memories involves choices with the purpose of making a whole and finding a pattern. — Zia Haider Rahman

When evil enters the world, do you think it comes with horns and cloven feet, billowing some foul stench? — Zia Haider Rahman

We are a dangerous breed, you and I. We are lock pickers. We are dangerous to others and ourselves. It is always a great risk to open a door if you don't know what's behind it. — Zia Haider Rahman

In Actual
Human Rights are
"caring" for Humans left on the planet — Haider Ali

Difficult questions can have simple answers. — Zia Haider Rahman

Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they're just fucking entertainment, and I am not here to fucking entertain you. — Zia Haider Rahman

It's always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, don't you think? — Zia Haider Rahman

Our choices are made, our will flexed, in the teeth of events that overwhelm us and devour us. — Zia Haider Rahman

If I had my time again, I'd believe in reincarnation. — Zia Haider Rahman

We're not put on this earth to fuck around. We have to make something of our lives. — Zia Haider Rahman

Afghanistan's barren, ragged desolation moaned a long dirge of ancient wonder, the earth's broken features ready to receive fallen horsemen, the lost traveller, and all the butchered tribes. — Zia Haider Rahman

Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing about reckless desire, the temptations of power, and the immanence of rage, or reading Naipaul might convince you to seize the ego that so wants to be loved, drag it outside, put it up against a wall, and shoot it. — Zia Haider Rahman

It is no consolation to reflect that every cause itself is an effect, making the search for causes and reasons a fool's errand. — Zia Haider Rahman

But that delusional urge is only one of the varieties of self-deception that encourage us to believe we know another human being and, for that matter, ourselves. This faith in having the measure of others really becomes unstuck when you begin to consider how many you'd acknowledge as having the measure of you. That number dwindles before your eyes. — Zia Haider Rahman

Yes, they mean well, but the only good that an absence of malice guarantees is a clear conscience. — Zia Haider Rahman

love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment. — Zia Haider Rahman

Nteraction with a fellow human being, especially one who can understand what you're going through and direct your awareness to the solutions you can use, is a powerful approach to self-help. — Haider Al-Mosawi

This is a miserable country, Zafar. I don't need to explain that to you. It needs help. Isn't it that simple?
Is anything that simple? — Zia Haider Rahman

I love America for an idea. The reality is important but ambiguous. In Senegal, there stands a building where slaves were stored before they were sent on to the New World. It was built in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence. I love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment. It may be an idea not everyone cares for, but it is one I need, I want. I love her for her thought, first, of where you're going, not where you're from; for her majestic optimism against the gray resistances of Europe, most pure in Britain, so that in America I feel like - I am - a sexual being. — Zia Haider Rahman

Autobiography, we know, is flawed from the moment the nib of the pen touches the parchment. — Zia Haider Rahman

What is the beginning of rage, the beginning of anger? Not dislike, but love. — Zia Haider Rahman

Maps, contour maps and all maps, intrigue us for the metaphors that they are: tools to give us a sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings. — Zia Haider Rahman

know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. - Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? — Zia Haider Rahman

cope with illness is by giving their life, their very — Haider Warraich

An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library. — Zia Haider Rahman

that the truth is finer and that the only answers each of us hears are to the questions we are capable of asking. — Zia Haider Rahman

Is that not the Promethean fable, that the fire stolen from the gods will light men their way even while it burns their hands? — Zia Haider Rahman

Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean. — Zia Haider Rahman

Listening is hard, as my friend once said, because you run the risk of having to change the way you see the world. — Zia Haider Rahman

You think people never say what they mean. The truth is, nine times out of ten what they say is all they mean. — Zia Haider Rahman

We take much for granted, much that is granted by others, and we're told to do as we're told, and we agree. And we must agree. — Zia Haider Rahman

Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know. — Zia Haider Rahman

Pointing to the sandstone buildings around us, some of which had stood there for several hundreds of years, she commented on how old everything in Oxford looked. Can't they afford anything new? she asked earnestly. — Zia Haider Rahman

Every man, he said, carries his own pyre. — Zia Haider Rahman

A woman's manly side is what's sexy
a woman standing strongly, fighting to be desired. — Haider Ackermann

The whole thing is too abstract, continued Zafar, this business of our lives standing for something else. All we know is that we don't want it to stand for nothing. So we dive headlong into becoming heroes, becoming the big swinging dick on Wall Street or the rock star or the hot-shot human rights lawyer. Which is about making our lives stand for something that our intelligence can grasp, saving us from confronting what we fear might be true - or what we would fear if we gave ourselves the chance - namely, that we're accidental pieces of flesh, mutton without meaning. — Zia Haider Rahman

He, like so many of them, came from that breed of international development experts unsparing in its love for all humanity but having no interest in people. — Zia Haider Rahman

I am as impressed by honesty as anyone, but when there is a hint that a man is taking me into his confidence, my first instinct is to suspect him. Am I to be flattered? And is he about to break another's confidence? — Zia Haider Rahman

Advisers were numberless in Kabul, like stray dogs in Mumbai. — Zia Haider Rahman

It was always better to rebel in company than alone. — Shazaf Fatima Haider

How many senators have taken their conception of what America can do from what they've seen on the American movie screen? — Zia Haider Rahman

I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent: Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds. My father and I chuckled. What happened to him? Gone. My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you're made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It's only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. — Zia Haider Rahman

That's another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you. — Zia Haider Rahman

I wasn't as untrusting. I had faith in the goodness of people, the perfection of love.
What happened?
Everything ends. And it's how they end that leaves the lasting effect. — Zia Haider Rahman