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If the hour comes, and there’s no-one to beg or blame but yourself, you learn that what we have in the end is just a handful more than what was born in us. That unique handful, what we add to what we are, is the only story of us that isn’t told by someone else.
lot of differences between communities come down to ghobi and gosht,
Family, home: little words that rise like atolls in earthquakes of the heart.
Loss, loneliness: little words that flood the valleys of alone.
It’s a foolish thing to try to love, when the one you really love, the one you’re born to love, is lost somewhere in the same square circle of a city. It’s a desperate, foolish thing to try to love someone at all. Love doesn’t try: love is immediate, and inescapable.
Fear is a wolf on a chain, only dangerous when you set it free. Sorrow exhausts itself in the net of forgetting. Anger, for all its fury, can be killed by a smile. Only hope goes on forever, because hope doesn’t belong to us: it belongs to our ancestors, the first of our kind, whose brave love for one another gave us most of the good that we are.
The past is a novel, written by Fate, weaving the same themes: love and its glory, hate and its prisoners, the soul and its price.
Pain is just proof of life.
sometimes, all the guts you have is the guts you pretend, because you love someone too much to lose their respect.
I wrapped my arms around her, pressing her against that hollow tree, my life, where I’d hidden the dream that she would love me, forever.
Everyone has one eye that’s softer and sadder, and one that’s hard and bright. Karla’s left eye was softer and sadder than her right, and maybe it was because I could only see that soft light, greener than new leaves, that I had no resistance to her. I couldn’t do anything but listen, and smile, and try to be funny now and then.
‘Honour is the art of being humble,’ I
‘Every goodbye is a dress rehearsal for the last goodbye,’
The way to love, is to love the way.’
‘Justice, like love and power, is measured in mercies.’
Emotions were leaves in a storm on her face. There
fields of cloud, ploughed by the storm.
bitter failure that brought eventual success.
I understood the power that comes into us when another man, even if it’s only one other, bends his knee in devotion. I understood that men sell the power of that dream to women, every time they propose.’
Loyalty is something you need for things you don’t love enough. When you love enough, loyalty isn’t even a question.
Faith is belief without fear, and freedom is one of faith’s perfections. Standing
panel. The reckless truth of travel into countries and cultures far from your own is that sometimes, you’re just rolling with the dice. Fate, the tour guide, can lead any traveller, at any moment of the journey, into a labyrinth of learning and love, or the long tunnel of a dangerous adventure. And every traveller knows those moments in the mirror: the last, long look at yourself before Okay, let’s do this.
silence so complete that the occasional animal or bird cry was shocking.
The why of her was still a mystery, because the why of anyone only comes with connection. I felt helpless to console her.
Minds floated free across fields of green velvet to memory’s greener pastures: that place, inside, where the soul is always a tourist.
sarongs, the place we’d called home was cold, and alone. What is civilisation? Idriss once remarked. It’s a woman, free to live as she wants.
And isn’t that love, Lisa, I thought, looking at the box of charms. When it means nothing to anybody else, and it means everything to us, isn’t that love?
The worst part of being in love with a woman who’s smarter than you are, is that you can’t stop coming back for more, which, as it happens, is also the best part.
When all else fails, the sign above the mirror said, steel it out.
Small birds chittered from branch to branch, fussing and fidgeting among the leaves.
‘Knowledge isn’t knowledge, until the truth of it is self-evident in the sharing.
Vermilion sunset, the last grace of the sun, washed flaws and faults from every face and form on the promenade: an ocean of evening light showing only the beautiful things we are inside.
mercy is a virtue best reserved for the virtuous,
Sometimes, the bravest thing we ever do is the thing we never get to do. And sometimes the spark that ignites a brother’s love, in men not born brothers, is nothing more than a pure intention.
Fate makes you a judge, as often as you’re judged.
The moon, our lonely sister, filters pain and harm from sunlight, and reflects it back to us safely, free of burn and blemish.
Those things inside, when the woman you love smiles at you: those spears of courage, that rain. People
Faith is unconditional love, and love is unconditional faith.
Every blow struck against a chained man, every injection to pacify rebellion, every electrocution of will is an insult to what we’ll be, when we become what we’re destined to be. Time is a membrane, a connective tissue, and it can be bruised. Time can’t heal all wounds: Time is all wounds. Only love and forgiveness heal all wounds.
Corruption is a tax imposed on any society that doesn’t pay people enough to repel it themselves. His
‘I love you so much, Karla, that I’m lost in it, and I always will be.’ Men don’t like to be that honest about love: to put the gun in a woman’s hand, and hold it against their own hearts, and say, Here, this is how you kill me. But it was okay. It was okay.
Men are wishes wrapped in secrets, and women are secrets wrapped in wishes.’
Life, consciousness, freedom, love, justice, fairness, honesty, mercy, affinity, courage, generosity, compassion, forgiveness, empathy and many beautiful others.
‘Exploitation is the spiritual language of profit,’
‘Oppression is the spiritual language of tyranny,’ Idriss
‘Hypocrisy is the spiritual language of greed,’
‘Ruthlessness is the spiritual language of power, and bigotry is the spiritual language of fear.’
‘Violence is the spiritual language of hate,’
arrogance is the spiritual language of vanity.’
‘Emotion is the spiritual language of music,’
