Shayan

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Diyar-e-Ishq Mein Apna Maqam Paida Kar,
Naya Zamana, Naye Subah-o-Sham Paida Kar;

Khuda Agar Dil-e-Fitrat Shanas De Tujh Ko,
Sakoot-e-Lala-o-Gul Se Kalaam Paida Kar;

Mera Tareeq Ameeri Nahin, Faqeeri Hai,
Khudi Na Baich, Ghareebi Mein Naam Paida Kar

Build in love’s empire your hearth and your home;
Build Time anew, a new dawn, a new eve!

Your speech, if God give you the friendship of Nature,
From the rose and tulip’s long silence weave

The way of the hermit, not fortune, is mine;
Sell not your soul! In a beggar’s rags shine.”
― Muhammad Iqbal, Baal-e-Jibreel

“At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena