The Golden Legend Quotes

“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. —”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend

“To have not succeeded in the world was required to be a source of shame for a person. And yet she suspected that failure in worldly terms was the condition of the majority people of the world. To have been rejected, to have lacked courage, to have tried but failed.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend

“Sometimes a man has to be great enough to know how insignificant he is.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend

“Be careful,” she said. “You can’t fight a tiger.”
“Yes you can,” he said. “You can if you are a tiger yourself.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend

“Force has no meaning in the world," he had said to them, and holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart to indicate the smallness of the bird, had added, "God speaks through the least of His creatures.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend

“Why can’t I wake up? she had said upon opening her eyes in bed the day after her mother’s death.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend

“Maybe there is no news," Lily said, but only a moment later he corrected himself. "There is news, they just don’t put it in the newspapers anymore.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend

“Yes. That’s it. Speaking about it to others would have made it real. It would have become a fact. Their reaction, their responses, their words -- it would all tell me that the terrible thing had happened. That I wasn’t just imagining it.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend

“Laments were as old as verses of love, she knew. They were verses of love. For the departed who will never be met again, for the burned cities.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend

“She knew she would never really recover. It was as though her pen ran out of ink while writing a letter. She had picked up another containing ink of a different color and continued; but even if the words and the lines of thought remained the same, something had altered.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend