Nadeem Aslam > Quotes

“Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

“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, Maps for Lost Lovers

“On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

“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, Maps for Lost Lovers

“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, Maps for Lost Lovers

“There is nothing that torments Satan more than the sight of a faithful in prayer.”
― Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers

“A lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it.”
― Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers

“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, Maps for Lost Lovers

“All great artists know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings.”
― Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers

“There are no innocent people in a guilty nation.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden

“Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery. But no nation should ever require its citizens to be that brave.”
― 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, The Wasted Vigil

“All those who love know exactly the limit they're prepared to go to. They know exactly what is required.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

“Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden

“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

“History is the third parent.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden

“Her mind is a haunted house.”
― 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, The Wasted Vigil

“The young everywhere…would prefer to live in houses that consist only of doors.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

“To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

“God is just a name for our wonder.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden

“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 Blind Man's Garden

“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 Wasted Vigil

“Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

“Modesty and decency dwell in the mind, not in a burka.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden

“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 opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden

“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, Maps for Lost Lovers

“The sky is a blue so clean it verges on joy.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden

“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 Golden Legend