Agha Shahid Ali > Quotes

“Stationary"

The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.

Write to me.”
― Agha Shahid Ali, The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems

“I flipped through their visions,
left my number in their sleep.
But no one called back.
I called all night,
called for years,
called till their lids began to ring,
ten, twenty, two hundred times,
and then they went blind
on my dreams.
Now their eyes don't open.
No one picks up the phone.”
― Agha Shahid Ali, The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems

“Then why let anything remain
when whatever we loved
turned instantly to stone?”
― Agha Shahid Ali, A Nostalgist's Map of America: Poems

“There again is memory
at my doorstep --

jasmine crushed under
departing feet.

The moon extinguishes
its silver pain

on the window.”
― Agha Shahid Ali, A Nostalgist's Map of America: Poems

“In the heart's wild space lies the space of wilderness.
What won't one lose, what home one won't give forever!”
― Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals

“Srinagar hunches like a wild cat: lonely sentries, wretched in bunkers at the city’s bridges, far from their homes in the plains, licensed to kill . . . while the Jhelum flows under them, sometimes with a dismembered body. On Zero Bridge the jeeps rush by. The candles go out as travelers, unable to light up the velvet Void.
What is the blesséd word? Mandelstam gives no clue. One day the Kashmiris will pronounce that word truly for the first time.”
― Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post Office

“The man who buries his house in the sand and digs it up again, each evening, learns to put it together quickly and just as quickly to take it apart. My parents sleep like children in the dark. I am too far to hear them breathe”
― Agha Shahid Ali, The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems

“He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven.
He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.”
― Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals

“Someone speak to the God.
Someone turn the moon.
My country is in Muhurram.
And I have to call it an Eid.”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“The moon touched my shoulder
and I longed for a vanished love”
― Agha Shahid Ali, A Nostalgist's Map of America: Poems

“Everyone carries his address in pocket so that atleast his body will reach home.”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“The country of the blind has ordered mirrors
Its one-eyed king's vision is now prime for time”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous for the other passengers?
O just my heart!”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“My memory is again in the way of your history”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“They make a desolation and call it peace.”
― Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post Office

“All night
I keep the heart shut
I am waiting for a greater madness
To declare myself”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“We mourn the martyrs of Karbala
our skins torn with chains.”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“Waiting for the Revolution can be as agonizing and intoxicating as waiting for one’s lover.”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“My parents sleep like children in the dark
I am too far to hear them breathe”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“Snowmen

My ancestor, a man
of Himalayan snow,
came to Kashmir from Samarkand,
carrying a bag
of whale bones:
heirlooms from sea funerals.
His skeleton
carved from glaciers, his breath
arctic,
he froze women in his embrace.
His wife thawed into stony water,
her old age a clear
evaporation.

This heirloom,
his skeleton under my skin, passed
from son to grandson,
generations of snowmen on my back.
They tap every year on my window,
their voices hushed to ice.

No, they won’t let me out of winter,
and I’ve promised myself,
even if I’m the last snowman,
that I’ll ride into spring
on their melting shoulders.”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“The sky is stunned, it's become a ceiling of stone.
I tell you it must weep. So kneel, pray for rain in Arabic.”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“I heard the incessant dissolving of silk
I felt my heart growing so old in real time”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“Karbala was chosen for Kashmir's seasons mixed into the graveyard's cold beds of roses we are such pilgrims.”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“Not all, only a few--
disguised as tulips, as roses--
return from ashes.
What possibilities
has the earth forever
covered, what faces?”
― Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms Are Never Finished: Poems

“From windows we hear
grieving mothers and snow begins to fall on us, like ash
Black on edges of flames,
it cannot extinguish the neighborhoods,
the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers”
― Agha Shahid Ali