shams

“For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Why, conquering
May prove as lordly and complete a thing
In lifting upward, as in crushing low!
And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword
To one who lifts him from the bloody earth,
Even so, Belovëd, I at last record,
Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth,
I rise above abasement at the word.
Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth!”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese

“അഥവാ ക്ഷമപോലെ നന്മചെ-
യ്തരുളാൻ നോറ്റൊരു നല്ല ബന്ധുവും
വ്യഥപോലറിവോതിടുന്ന സദ്-
ഗുരുവും മർത്യനു വേറേയില്ലതാൻ”
― Kumaran Asan , ചിന്താവിഷ്ടയായ സീത | Chinthavishtayaya Seetha

“And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.

I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet