Nupur Jindal > Nupur 's Quotes

“In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“For to stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings. Alone must it seek the ether.

And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.”
― Khalil Gibran

“Shall the day of parting be the day of gathering?
And shall it be said that my eve was in truth my dawn?”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“There is no language without deceit.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Is love stronger when it let's go or when it holds on?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“It was to slough off a burden of nostalgia
that you went so far away!" he exclaimed, or else: "You return from your voyages with a cargo of regrets!”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“The least amount of courtesy you should extend to someone is acknowledgement that they exist.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“you can only know how you feel in the here and now, not how you’ll feel years, months or even days down the line.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography

“Its a moonsmile. No light of its own unless there's a sun for it to reflect off”
― kamila shamsie

“Why grateful? Because sometimes you know you’re standing on a cusp, and you know that in knowing it you’ve gone past the cusp over to the other side, or at least almost entirely so, entirely except for one toe that still hangs on to childhood; one toe or one finger or one shoulder blade curving back to meet another shoulder blade which curves forward to meet yours in a reminder that, if you had wings, this, right here, is where they would sprout”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Travelling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Who among us has never been moved to tears, or to tears’ invisible counterparts, by mention of the word ‘home’? Is there any other word that can feel so heavy as you hold it in your mouth?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Sometimes you hear the voices of people whose every cadence you think you know by heart. By heart. But then sounds emerge from their throats, sounds that you want to believe cannot belong to them, but it’s worse than that because you know that they do; you hear the sound and you know that this grating cacophony belongs to them as much as does the music in their voices when they call you by nicknames that should sound utterly silly but instead are transformed by affection into something to cherish. I heard Aunty Maheen turn on my father, and I knew that one day, not today perhaps, not even next year, but one day people more familiar to me than the smell of sea air would become strangers and I would become a stranger to them.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn’t it? Didn’t it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped? How could you say anything unless you knew how the serpents and abysses had come to be, and what it meant to live with them every single day?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“… and that’s why they leave, isn’t it? Because they have to see themselves in the context of something larger than just the two of them. It’s like that Faiz poem, you know, mujh say pehli si muhabat, when you’ve seen the sorrows of the rest of the world you can’t go on pretending none of it matters, you can’t pretend two people can really live in isolation telling themselves their love is all that matters in the world. And that two of them, when they come back to the city, that’s when they find out that their love was imperfect because it couldn’t bear the knowledge of everything that lies outside…”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Things mutate, thoughts and emotions, they mutate inside you in ways you aren’t even aware of.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“To look at waves and understand that when they break they start to re-form.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zikora

“Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zikora

“The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

“For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous