Jesal

“The strangest thing was that we never realised … when India ended and Pakistan began. There were no obvious differences between one land and its conjoined neighbour, and so I suspect that we gained our new citizenship in a moment curiously lost on us. Tucked away in a corner of an overcrowded train, we had quietly become Pakistani.”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

“At least this mountain world, to which I owed so much of life and happiness, would stand above the ruin of human hopes, the heritage of a saner generation of men.”
― Eric Shipton, Nanda Devi

“When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I want to hold you close like a lute,
so we can cry out with loving.

You would rather throw stones at a mirror?
I am your mirror, and here are the stones.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“You gave your life to become you are right now. Was it worth it?”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah