Mutasim Billah > Recent Status Updates

Once our standards of education return to how they were many centuries ago, once we get over the Incident and any other tragedy corruption and mismanagement throws our way, we will go back to doing great things, I am sure.

“Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.”

“Silence is just as likely to indicate the most profound ideas forming, the deepest energies being summoned.”

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

The young station attendant went inside, practically in tears, to plead with the receptionist—“He’s going to die, you have to do something.” I went in with him. At that point Takahashi was still alive. His eyes were blinking.

“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”

When at the age of twenty one, I went to Lahore to meet my Pakistani father for the first time in my adult life, I was given, in addition to a new Pakistani family, a copy of my grandfather’s poems.

Once, it was dusk and I was by the kerosene lamp, moving my face closer and closer to the lamp. She was sitting across me—we were of the same age and were hanging out—and realized what I was doing.

‘No matter how close you come to the light, you will always remain black and invisible,’ she quipped mercilessly. ‘Only your teeth will be visible.’

When Bill felt himself flagging, he’d grab a jar of Tang, pour some powder on one hand, and lick it off for a pure sugar high. (His palms had a chronic orange tinge that summer.) Often we would work for two days straight and then crash for eighteen or twenty hours, which Bill called “getting slept up.”

If we’d been older or known better, Bill and I might have been put off by the task in front of us. But we were young and green enough to believe that we just might pull it off.

My father passed away yesterday. It's been a long, rough year and has left our family drained. If you can, please keep him in your thoughts and prayers.

Thank you.

I won't be writing about books for a bit. Life's gotten me into a rut. Even though my head is full of words, I'm unable to type up something sensible.

Let's hope it ends soon. Happy reading!

So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!

He floated, weightless. He was no longer falling; there was nothing left for him to move in relation to.

Empty. Black. Nothingness. Void.

This was his existence now. The terror had gone and in its place was utter despair.

She had brought flowers from the garden. As she arranged them in vases, she gave me a smile whose warmth caressed me.

I want to make it absolutely clear, straight away, that I never once thought of love during the first few months of my stay in the house.

Yeah, right!

“I want to share with you the brutal truths of the world.”

Nick Cave's wonderful rejection letter to MTV.

Gifts are dangerous when they are given and not earned – a lesson merely heard is never a lesson learned.

All current reads on-hold until I'm done with this one.

The letter, allegedly from Jack the Ripper, was found with a package, inside which was found half a human kidney.

I was sitting in my office, my lease had expired and McKelvey was starting eviction proceedings. It was a hellish hot day and the air conditioner was broken. A fly crawled across the top of my desk. I reached out with the open palm of my hand and sent him out of the game.

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

A large black man is sitting in one chair (stage right) and in the other a middle-aged white man dressed in running pants and athletic shoes. He wears a T-shirt and the jacket—which matches the pants—hangs on the chair behind him.

Time, space: necessities. Fate, luck: accidents. Life's traps, all of them. You will to be. There is that. But in the abstract, there is no such thing. Being must be snared in form, and for a time come to an end in it, here or there, in this way or that. Everything, so long as it endures, bears with it the penalty of its own form, the pain of being the way it is and of not being able any onger to be something other.

In this uninterrupted stream of women, men, children, and dogs that pass by and end up lost from sight among the streets, it would be nice to hold on to a face once in a while.

There were two entrances to the café, but she always opted for the narrower one hidden in the shadows.

This is to let everyone know that I'm going through an intense chapter of my life. I may not be available as much from now on and may fail to reply to all your messages and comments.

Thank you.

Happy reading!

I could read it in his eyes. At the first words, we would have collapsed like those puppets in shooting galleries when the pellet hits the mark. Annie, Little Hélène, and Roger Vincent had certainly wound up in jail. I had lost my brother. The thread had snapped—a gossamer strand. There was nothing left of all that …

I was about to walk out the entrance door when the hall light went on behind me. They were both in the hallway and he was carrying his suitcase in his hand. His left arm was around Nicole’s shoulder. They walked by and she pretended not to know me. But at the corner she looked back and gave me a brief wave.