Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"forever and anyone who wants to communicate with me will have to have totally perfected the art of touching without causing pain."

"it learned to fight like a wild thing to wait in the dark for the predators to come and stab them with the blades it kept hidden in itself."

"a force of gravity, a storyline binding us all together:
my father, his fist, my mother, the scar. me and moon and you, my love

and you."

"there are no words in your mouth
but there’s a pen in your head
you want to tell the truth
but you told stories instead"

"you don’t answer, why don’t you answer
you should answer but the answer don’t matter, do it?"

"there some stories that are never told/but known
nonetheless we bake them into bread/fill buns with secrets"

"he’s the air i breathe/love-
flavoured oxygen"

"On waking up, in this bedroom, he realised that it had taken him fifteen years to cross the street."

"It would appear, he often used to say to himself, that children never ask themselves any questions. Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don’t even know."

"We discover, often too late to talk to them about it, an episode from their life that a loved one has concealed from you."

"In the end, we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed. No, it is not always a matter of deliberate forgetfulness"...

"in periods of disaster or mental anxiety, all you need do is look for a fixed point in order to keep your balance and not topple overboard. Your gaze alights on a blade of grass, a tree, the petals of a flower, as though you were clinging on to a buoy."

"The present and the past merge together, and that seems quite natural because they were only separated by a cellophane partition."

"এঞ্জিনিয়াররা টয়লেট না বসিয়ে বড়দিনের সময় প্রতি পঞ্চাশ জনের জন্য একটি বহনযোগ্য শৌচাগার ক্যাম্পে আনাতো, তারপর কীভাবে ব্যবহার করলে সেগুলো অনেকদিন ভালো থাকবে তার একটা গণপ্রদর্শনীর আয়োজন করতো।"

"মুচকি হেসে সে বলে, 'আমরা সবাইকে বলব ওকে আমরা একটা ঝুড়িতে ভাসমান অবস্থায় পেয়েছি।'
সন্ন্যাসিনী বলে, 'কেউ সে কথা বিশ্বাস করবে না।'
ফারনান্দা জবাব দেয়, 'লোকে যদি বাইবেলের কথা বিশ্বাস করতে পারে তাহলে আমার কথা কেন করবে না?’ "

"মিতবাক, নীরব, আর বাড়িটাকে কাঁপিয়ে দেয়া প্রাণশক্তির নতুন প্রশ্বাসের দিকে ভ্রুক্ষেপহীন কর্ণেল আউরেলিয়ানো বুয়েন্দিয়া কেবল এটুকুই বুঝতো যে চমৎকার বার্ধক্যের মূল কথা হচ্ছে স্রেফ নিঃসঙ্গতার সঙ্গে একটা সম্মানজনক চুক্তি।"

"সেই সময় থেকেই বার্ধক্যের চিহ্ন ফুটে উঠতে থাকে যাজকপ্ললীর পাদ্রী ভদ্রলোকটির মধ্যে, কয়েক বছর পরেই তা এই পর্যায়ে গিয়ে ঠেকবে যে তিনি বলবেন, শয়তান সম্ভবত ইশ্বরের বিরুদ্ধে যুদ্ধে জিতে গিয়েছিল, আর স্বর্গীয় আসনে সে-ই বসেছে, কিন্তু অসাবধানীদের যাতে ফাঁদে ফেলা যায় সেজন্য যে তার নিজের পরিচয় ফাঁস করেনি।"

"সামরিক বাহিনীর লোকজনকে সে মনে করে নীতিহীন কুঁড়ে, উচ্চাকাঙ্ক্ষী ষড়যন্ত্রকারী, আর ডামাডোলের সময় ফায়দা লোটার জন্য জনগণের সাথে বেঈমানীতে ওস্তাদ।"

অ খোদা! এই লাইনটা পড়ে সামরিক-বেসামরিক কতগুলো নাম যে মনে আসলো :D :D

""We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;—the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin.""

""We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;—the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin.""

"And men will not understand us—for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten—and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside."

""Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks—shattering, corroding, death.

Dysentery, influenza, typhus—scalding, choking, death.""

""What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;— it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?""

+""that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up—take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now."

+""It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us,""+

""Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response.""+

"I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me."

""I think it is more of a kind of fever," says Albert. "No one in particular wants it, and then all at once there it is. We didn't want the war, the others say the same thing—and yet half the world is in it all the same.""

"Many of them are second-hand, all the classics for example, one volume in blue cloth boards cost one mark twenty pfennig. I bought them complete because it was thoroughgoing, I did not trust the editors of selections to choose all the best. So I purchased only "collected works.""

"I soon found out this much:— terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;— but it kills, if a man thinks about it."