BILAL AHMAD

“Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.”
― Ismail Kadare

“There were people dying everywhere getting massacred in every town and village, there were people being picked up and thrown into dark jails in unknown parts, there were dungeons in the city where hundreds of young men were kept in heavy chains and from where many never emerged alive, there were thousands who had disappeared leaving behind women with photographs and perennial waiting, there were multitudes of dead bodies on the roads, in hospital beds, in fresh martyrs' graveyards and scattered casually on the snow of mindless borders.”
― Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator

“In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities.”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre