Aslam Mir

“Strange how for the last five hundred years the fate of The Jews had so often been tied to our own (Muslims') future. Where we suffer, they suffer. Where we prosper, they prosper. Where they are present and we are not, they fail to defend themselves and are slaughtered like sheep.It is the same story here, in al-Abdalus and in al-Quds,Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus. (A Sultan In Palermo, Islam Quintet 4, Tariq Ali, page 221, 222)”
― Tariq Ali, A Sultan in Palermo

“Perfume the literature you write with only the finest inks,
for literature works are luscious girls, and ink their precious perfume.
—Arabic saying ~800 AD”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“The characters in my novels are my unrealized possibilities, That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own ' I' ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become." ( Milan Kundera, The Unforgettable Lightness of Being: Page, 218)”
― Milan Kundera

“Something else raised him above the others as well: he had an open book on his table. No one had ever opened a book in that restaurant before. In Tereza's eyes, books were the weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."( The Unforgettable lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, page 47)”
― Milan Kundera