Quotes from Nadeem Aslam

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.

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

Modesty and decency dwell in the mind, not in a burka.

He would drift through the house in search of the coolest spot to read through the long summer afternoons that had a touch of eternity to them, altering the arrangement of his limbs as much for comfort as for the fear that his undisturbed shadow would leave a stain on the wall.

Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself.

The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war.

She thought of the boy thrown into the cauldron of war, the girl beset by various bigotries, her life in danger, and saw how unjust it all was, her fury limitless for a few moments. And she felt a sense of shame, something akin to accusation from them towards her and her generation, for not having constructed a better world to welcome and contain their beauty, to house their spirit. —