Nadeem Aslam Quotes

Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.

Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery. But no nation should ever require its citizens to be that brave.

There is nothing that torments Satan more than the sight of a faithful in prayer.

Paper is the strongest material in the world. Things under which a mountain will crumble, you can place on paper and it will hold: beauty at its most intense; love at its fiercest; the greatest grief; the greatest rage.

Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another’s loneliness.

 

To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there.

There are no innocent people in a guilty nation.

All great artists know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings.

How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It’s like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.

On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step

Nothing is an accident: it’s always someone’s fault; perhaps-but no one teaches us how to live with our mistakes. Everyone is isolated, alone with his or her anguish and guilt, and too penetrating a question can mean people are not able to face one another the next day.

The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important.

As a writer, my homeland is the desk where I work.

History is the third parent.

Her mind is a haunted house.

Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone’s life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.

Women joked amongst themselves: ‘Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It’s for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past- “you were born and then I married you”- but men are fools.

This is among the few things that can be said about love with any confidence. It is small enough to be contained within the heart but, pull thin, it would drape the entire world.

The neighbourhood is a place of…intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds.

A lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it.

There are times in this life when a person must do or say things he doesn’t want to. Human beings and chains, it is the oldest acquaintanceship in the world.

All those who love know exactly the limit they’re prepared to go to. They know exactly what is required.

Paper is the strongest material in the world; paper can handle what I can’t.