Quotes from Attia Hosain

I think Destiny's purpose is merely to shock us at moments into a state of awareness; those moments are milestones in between which we have to find our own way.

The whole city was richer because he was in it, and every street, and turn of a road held the possibility of his appearance.

They sat behind a screen, and grunted and wheezed over sheets of brown paper that looked as if ink-dipped and intoxicated spiders had danced across them.

You tell yourself: I'll be gone To some other land, some other sea, To a city far lovelier than this Could ever have been or hoped to be - … You will find no new lands, no other seas. The

You'll understand one day how murderous, how suicidal, individual isolation is. You'll cry then, suffocated by our culture's cannibal loving." He

In August 1947 on the cusp of Independence, my parents sat in the United Services Club in London with two friends, soldier comrades from the recent war. One of them – later to become a chief of the Indian army – raised his glass to the other – who became a general and diplomat in Pakistan. He said, "Let us drink to the aborted twins!" Attia records this with a sense of horror and disbelief.

Much later, reflecting on Iago's dictum, "Put money in thy purse" she noted rather wryly, "I live on the capital of my mind").

There is that sense of belonging one never has except in one's own country. Anywhere else, no matter how long you stay, they never let you forget you are alien. Indeed, it is a good thing, because it is on foreign soil that you are made more conscious of your own roots and consequently become more knowledgable. And that is why, in my writings, I talk of my country, present my people to others.

There were vast spaces in which his spirit could reach out, touching this, possessing that, of a million crowding sensations, but gradually at first, then rapidly, he had found himself reaching out to ever-receding mirages, alone in a void. He

I grew up with the English language but not with the culture behind it. I was always outside that and deeply rooted in my own. I

And writing in a foreign language, you come to realise how words create not only a single image but a series of images, so that if the image created in the mind of the writer is different from the image in the mind of the reader, there will not be complete understanding between them. My

She had a nose that looked like an afterthought, not moulded into her face, but stuck on much as a child would model a face; and she was so thin it seemed her zeal for conversion had consumed her flesh

I was taught from childhood of the sanctity of food. Not a piece of bread could be thrown away without kissing it and raising it to one's eyes as with all things holy.