Durre

“When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. "A memoir is the lost inheritance," you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Not all of us are horrid,’ he told her once. ‘Not all of us think of all Indians as our subjects.’ All Indians? Us? She did not know how to explain that she had never trusted these words and did not know what was worse, being a part of all or not, as it seemed the decision had never been hers to make. Nor did she know how to explain that it was not a question of what one or two might think. It had more to do with the patterns inherited, the lies inhabited, though she could not find the words, and so she said nothing.”
― Uzma Aslam Khan, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali

“The opposite of peace is not war. The opposite of peace is inertia.”
― Uzma Aslam Khan, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali

“It matters what you call a thing.”
― Solmaz Sharif, Look: Poems