Buran

“The most beautiful novel is the one that starts with a sentence wholly unexpected by the reader who has lived through our storms and norms, and who might once have been the cause of our changing moods.”
― Ahlam Mosteghanemi

“Nervously, I light a cigarette and chase through the smoke for the wounds that years have seared my soul, words whose fire has never been quenched by ink. Is paper a dustbin for the memory, a place where we always deposit the ash of the last cigarette of nostalgia, the remnants of the final disappointment? Which one of us lights up or stubs the other? I really do not know. Before you, I never wrote anything worth mentioning. Because of you, I put pen to paper.”
― Ahlam Mosteghanemi

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.”
― Julian Barnes