I Stared at the Night of the City Quotes

“In the beginning, science is a thing imagined; in the beginning, war is a thing imagined; in the beginning, love is a thing imagined; in the beginning, even God is a thing imagined. There is nothing that has not first been imagined. Even before there are words, there is imagination.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“From my travels across the imaginary map, I came to realise that there are two types of cities in the world. The first are those you cannot penetrate. Even when you’ve entered this type of city, you are always on the outside, constantly circling its walls. You are always at a distance, never crossing its threshold. The other type, meanwhile, you can never leave. Once you enter, you remain imprisoned there forever. Wherever you go, you are still there. You might combine it with other cities or make it part of bigger ones. You can add cities to it, like adding another layer to a cake, but you can’t get away.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“I wanted to carry out my fantastical journeys across imaginary maps accompanied by a group of blind children because they needed to travel. A world that we, the sighted, can’t see with our eyes, and that is the same for all of us – blind and seeing alike. The”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“A revolution is like a dream. When it ends we all wake up, the dream fades and is forgotten. There is nothing in this world as fickle as a revolution.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“Yet the stories themselves brought the smell of the alleyways, the damp air of the old houses and the smell of sadness from the city’s friendless people into the book, so that as you opened it you felt a strange air, the hot exhalations of the deceased, the smell of the lives they had left behind.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“No one can own poetry. No one can register ghazals to his name, like real estate. All one can do is to use poetry, ghazals and the imagination to avoid losing the world and losing oneself.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“he came to understand that there was a hidden writer of ghazals – a ghazalnus – in every person.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“but it should be noted even so that a well-thought out, well laid-out fantasy follows a complex and impossible geometry. The mathematics of the imagination adheres more rigorously to terms and theorems than the mathematics of reality.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“There are brainless people, idiots, who think that just because two lovers don’t sleep together in real life, it doesn’t happen at all. That is a lie. All the lovers of the world sleep together in their imaginations.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“And some chapters of this book should be read in dim candlelight; not because of the classical style and composition of the writing, but because reading them will make us disbelieve and doubt the things we see and the very world we live in. They force us to retreat to our rooms or behind locked doors to ponder how much our understanding of the world is rooted in reality and how much in fantasy.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“Dreams are often dangerous.
Those endowed with an imagination don't run a way from this world, They think about the fate of all its creatures. They worry even about the flowers and the ants.
But someone with a dream wants to make everyone service his dream.
Ghazalnus”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“Everything in this world is the fruit of the imagination. If there is no imaginary garden in our head, we can't plant a real one.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“I think that after a revolution a man needs a few years to get used to the new era. I knew from my limited and worthless experience that those who tear down and destroy one era cannot build another. Just as weapons can't suddenly become flowers, a killer can't suddenly turn gardener.
Hasan-i Tofan, an earlier killer and member of "The Finishing-Off Sports Club”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“I think that after a revolution a man needs a few years to get used to the new era. I knew from my limited and worthless experience that those who tear down and destroy one era cannot build another. Just as weapons can't suddenly become flowers, a killer can't suddenly turn gardener.
Hasan-i Tofan, an earlier killer and member of "The Finishing-Off Sports Club”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“writing is the only path we can take that does not end in death. Writing is the only path the day can take never to meet the night.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“He who wants to tame the imagination wants to kill it.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“Women rarely gift the gardens of their souls to anyone. You are the luckiest man in the world.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“Someone who can’t bear the truth can’t bear the imagination either. Your dream cities are worth nothing to me. Your mansions and engineersgive nothing to my soul … you, your leaders and barons create these cities because you can’t bear to look at the real city, whereas I can arrive at the gardens of imagination precisely because I dare to look upon all this sadness. You can’t look at the hideous streets or the troubled people in them. You can’t look at the withered gardens with their dead flowers. Your Excellency, I don’t need your dream city, I have my own. And my own imaginary garden. I have walked the streets of this city for thirty years. This is my dream city.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“If the poet’s voice inside a human soul is muted, that person can no longer bring anything new into the world.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“The Devil is a creature who robs books of imagination and magic, rendering them worthless by tossing them to the pavement. He mixes their contents into this old, exhausted, simple world so that they, too, look simple, old and exhausted, as if they were utensils, goods or fruit; as if they were one of the many weapons of war – an axe in the warrior’s hand.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“God is a creator, and a creator cannot simply sit and not create. People commit the greatest blasphemy when they say God completed everything in seven days. There is no creator who could complete all of Creation within seven days and then sit idly by forevermore.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“God devoted the eighth day of Creation to writing books; but who knows how long that eighth day lasted?”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“Wake up the human soul, and all the gardens in the world will awaken with it. All poets will eventually come to a garden unlike any other.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“poetry is the awakening of the soul – as is a garden.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“when reality is wonderful, its happiness spills over into the imagination; when it’s bitter, so does all its poison.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“Just as the birds fly in the sky, so we fly on these carpets. We travel through their designs and reach a world where there are no brutal or hard-hearted men.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“I saw the baron as a good man on the brink of going mad; but I was sure we were all on the brink of going mad, each in our own way.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“Real love is neither discovery alone nor search alone. It is discovery and search. Search and discovery.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“In this country, a man is nothing but a billiard ball, waiting and looking to see where he rolls. I’ve watched this all my life. I see those balls hitting one another, being scattered, coming close, dispersing,”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City

“It is imperative that we don’t know when we’ve been deceived or mistaken. It’s for our own good. If humans came to know all their mistakes, they would go mad.”
― Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City