कई चांद थे सरे-आसमां [Kai Chand The Sar-e-Aasman] Quotes

“...her own restless coveting of his love and the slow but sure ebullience of her desire for him; then the Nawab's martydom and her spiritual homelessness and physical loneliness; there was so much, so many portraits and landscapes, like the bright pages of an album of words and pictures. They filled her heart overflowing with the tangy, coppery taste of blood that flows from failure, and pricked her soul with nostalgia, for what was and what could have been. She had never thought that happy memories could come accompanied with so much regret, so much pain, so much repining, and discontent. If you plucked a rose without due care, its thorn pricked you to protest the thoughtlessness and the inconsiderateness you had displayed in taking away its crowning glory. Here, it was nothing else but the rose which was the thorn: its each and every petal was saturated with the scents of the past but it stung like the scorpion plant. But was it possible not to touch those memories? For their scents traveled in and out of your being like breath, and their colours were inside every blink of your eye.”
― Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Mirror of Beauty

“Wasim Jafar’s mind was like the storerooms of the bigger museums where items are kept that are not on display for some reason. Such rooms are full of the most unexpected, strange and rare objects.”
― Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Mirror of Beauty

“eighteenth-century Urdu poet Mir: It’s just your imagining that There’s a feeble body inside my clothes; In fact, there is nothing there But a mere idea of myself.”
― Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Mirror of Beauty

“Yes, my dear young gentleman, how could people like us who are brought up on the culture of the tube and the internet understand delicate and subtle matters like the styles and ways of coquetry? But young sir, I meant that we really needed to develop some sense, some understanding about our kukaram, our evil deeds …”
― Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Mirror of Beauty

“There isn’t anything better for one than to be solely pursuing a hobby. Freedom from want, a quiet corner of a pleasant home, and a hobby. How extremely agreeable! Only God is untouched by blemish!”
― Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Mirror of Beauty

“Was the decline and decay of those houses inevitable, absent the political pressure and military conflicts of those times? How do they look now, dimly descried from this distance of time? What is it that veils their images now? Is it the sooty dark of the past, or the pink haze of nostalgia and longing? How did these people regard themselves? What value did they put on their own selves? What kind of light coloured their self-perception? Did they apprehend or even imagine that the glorious sheathing that was their culture was soon to be rent asunder so that their value systems would mutate into the impenetrable smoke of a country in conflagration, with the smoke destined to dissolve itself into the ocean of the new age, and that the discontinuity wrought by this dissolution would be a gulf whose depth no one could sound and into which men’s power to recall the past would weaken and dissolve, and their memories would lose their way forever?”
― Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Mirror of Beauty

“old words can be re-narrated in new words: all that was needed was empathy, a power and ability to embrace and to feel the warmth of the embrace.”
― Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Mirror of Beauty