Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history. — Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy: das Buch zum Film von Patrice Chéreau. (Rowohlt Tb. June 1, 2001) Originally published 1998.
Character is just an invention…. It is the self-fulfilling prophecy that guides our lives… and the longer we live with it the more boxed in we are by the rapidly diminishing variedness of our imagined selves. What we can’t ever accept is that we might never know who we are. ― Kamila Shamsie, Broken Verses.… Continue reading Kamila Shamsie
Be near me Be near me now,My tormenter, my love, be near me—At this hour when night comes down,When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comesWith the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets,When it comes with cries of lamentation, with laughter with songs;Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every… Continue reading Faiz Ahmed Faiz
I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation? ― Hanif… Continue reading Hanif Kureishi
The road is long like an ancient poet’s night: plains and hills, rivers and valleys. Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily follows you or the gallows. — Mahmoud Darwish, from “To a Young Poet,” trans. Fady Joudah, Poetry (March 2010)
Before you came, things were as they should be: the sky was the dead-end of sight, the road was just a road, wine merely wine. Now everything is like my heart, a color at the edge of blood: the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns… — Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from “Before… Continue reading Faiz Ahmed Faiz
If I were to win you, Then Fate would be the loser. —Faiz Ahmad Faiz, from “Don’t Ask Me My Darling,” Memory Poetry of Faiz Ahmad Faiz. (Vudya Kitaban Forlag, 1987)
The Vale of Soul-Making 