Quotes from Nadeem Aslam

You have spent your whole life believing such untrue things. Don't you know how alone you are, David? We are most alone when we are with the myths.

The forgiveness of the weak is the air you strong ones breath, David. Didn't you know? You don't see it but you felt it just then. They allow you to go on living.

To have not succeeded in the world was required to be a source of shame for a person. And yet she suspected that failure in worldly terms was the condition of the majority people of the world. To have been rejected, to have lacked courage, to have tried but failed.

But have you ever heard a story in which the evil person triumphs at the end?" The boy thought for a while before replying. "No," he said, "but before they lose, they harm the good people. That is what I am afraid of.

In some respects, grief for the lost and missing is worse than grief for the dead, and sometimes just for a fraction of a second its intensity makes her wish Mikal would cease to exist, so she wouldn't have to wonder if she will ever see him again.

Be careful," she said. "You can't fight a tiger." "Yes you can," he said. "You can if you are a tiger yourself.

the slopes and summits that stand around them like solidified silence—time made visible in a different way, ancient and on an elongated scale.

but the child is silent, looking as though he would rather understand than speak.

She knew she would never really recover. It was as though her pen ran out of ink while writing a letter. She had picked up another containing ink of a different color and continued; but even if the words and the lines of thought remained the same, something had altered.

Laments were as old as verses of love, she knew. They were verses of love. For the departed who will never be met again, for the burned cities.

Yes. That's it. Speaking about it to others would have made it real. It would have become a fact. Their reaction, their responses, their words -- it would all tell me that the terrible thing had happened. That I wasn't just imagining it.

Maybe there is no news, Lily said, but only a moment later he corrected himself. There is news, they just don't put it in the newspapers anymore.

Why can't I wake up? she had said upon opening her eyes in bed the day after her mother's death.

At the gun shop, AK-47s were stacked six high on the shelves … The day after the West invaded Afghanistan, a 'piety discount' was introduced for those who wished to buy the weapon to go the jihad.

Force has no meaning in the world, he had said to them, and holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart to indicate the smallness of the bird, had added, God speaks through the least of His creatures.

Basie would lie on the mattress and talk endlessly, sometimes drinking from a bottle of Murree's whisky he'd bring with him, bought from one of the clandestine bars in Heer where there were locked cages for female drinkers, to prevent them from being sexually assaulted by the inebriated male clientele, as well as to stop the drunk women from killing every man in sight.

What strange times are these," says Tara as they wend their way through the dead to safety, "when Muslims must fear other Muslims.

We are warriors of Allah." "You are thugs with Korans.

How easy it is to create ghosts, he thinks as he begins to die a minute later, feeling his mind closing chamber by chamber, the memory of Naheed contained in each one. And despite it all it means much to have been loved. Just before the world vanishes, a hope surfaces in him that this wasn't necessarily everything, that he will return somehow. His arm rises, remembering when it used to be a wing.

The soles of his shoes are worn the way the edges of erasers become rounded with use. As though he walks around correcting his mistakes.

it doesn't matter to a person when he is in a hall of mirrors — he himself knows he is the one who is real. The confusion is for the onlookers.

If love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness, then he had loved Mikal since they were both ten years old.

Do you hear it?" "Yes," Mikal replies. "It's a battle, isn't it?" "Yes." "It's the world," one of the other men says. "The world sounds like this all the time, we just don't hear it. Then sometimes in some places we do.

Even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare. It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and, following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war – how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where the wheat was grown.