Aslam Mir

“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

“Money does not occur in nature, says the historian Jack Weatherford. Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French writer, put it another way: 'I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries. The first forms of money were commodity money, ranging from salt to tobacco, coconuts to rice, reindeer to buffaloes. The English word 'salary' derives from the Latin salarius, meaning of salt. (Roman soldiers were perhaps paid in salt, to flavour their otherwise bland food.)" ( Peter Watson, Ideas: A history of thought and invention, from fire to Freud, page 71).”
― Peter Watson

“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

“We all need colors to fill the blank spaces within the faint and drab outlines of our all-too-short lives.”
― Osama Siddique, Snuffing out the Moon