Sidra > Sidra's Quotes

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“It made me miserable that I was rapidly becoming an adult and that I was unable to do anything about it.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“رات یوں دل میں تری کھوئی ہوئی یاد آئی
جیسے ویرانے میں چپکے ے بہار آجائے
جیسے صحراؤں میں ہولے سے چلے بادِ نسیم
جیسے بیمار کو بے وجہ قرار آجائے”
― Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Nuskha ha-e Wafa / نسخہ ہائے وفا

“Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity.”
― Anton Chekhov

“I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I'm desperate and I'm tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I've experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I'd only like to have what I would have been and never was.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.”
― Allama Iqbal

“If you wish to be heard in the noise of this world, let your soul be dominated by a single idea. It is the man with a single idea who creates political and social revolutions, establishes empires and gives law to the world.”
― Muhammad Iqbal, Stray reflections: the private notebook of Muhammad Iqbal

“I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

“There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a great competition and rivalry between the two. There is a third power stronger than both, that of the women.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“I care nothing in comparison with papa. And I'll never -- never--oh, never while I have my senses, do an act or say a word to vex him. I love him better than myself, Ellen; and I know it by this: I pray every night that I may live after him; because I would rather be miserable than that he should be: that proves I love him better than myself.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking; and the result is a structure of absolute balance and solid composure.”
― Muhammad Asad

“The soul has two forces: the force to proceed and the force to restrain.”
― Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Excellence of Patience & Gratefulness

“What we call happiness is sometimes the accordance between our life and circumstances,our biography and history ,our personal aspirations and historical currents .If i look at things that way,I can say : I was born too early to be happy.But birth is one of the many things we do not get to choose.It's part of our destiny.
If I were offered life again,I would refuse it. But ,If i had to be born again. I would choose my life”
― Alija Izetbegović, Inescapable Questions