This House of Clay and Water Quotes

“Nobody thinks of protecting others from themselves. It's the people who claim concern and love who damage us the most.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“People who roam these roads in their metal cars don't feel, don't see. They will honk and curse if an accident happens in front of them, while the people on motorbikes, on bicycles and rickshaws, will stop to help. They have not travelled enclosed in metal prisons too long, and so the wind and the sun have touched them, helped them remain more human.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“You taught me to think, and you put ideas in my head. People read to forget. Books don't change the world, ji. You didn't tell me that. You talked of the dignity of the human spirit to a hijra.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“Poor Chameli. Born an anomaly and abandoned at birth. God knows what she must have gone through as a child. How many times must she have been molested, raped and abused while she struggled to make sense of her place in life? And then one day, just like that, she was butchered. The end.

Why did I even bother to get up every day? Whose dreams came true? Who found love? Which one of us was happy and secure?

Life is faithless. It is death alone that walks faithfully alongside us, from the day we are born until the day it finally takes us into its cool, dark embrace.

Life is exacting and cruel. Death is calm oblivion. Life betrays everyone while death, without fail, always finds us.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“They were happy, I thought. As a child, laughter is all you need as proof of happiness. As a child you don't know there are so many different kinds of laughter - like different varieties of birds. Some are flightless.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“How carelessly we used words, thoughtless of the trail of slime and sludge they left behind. Mouth, tongue, teeth, all sullied with the rot of misused words.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“I was an utterance in absentia. I was a forgotten word, uttered and mislaid long ago. I was the word that existed because there was another word that was my opposite, and without it I was nothing. I gained meaning only by acknowledging that possible other.
Nida”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“What was more tragic, the lives people lived, or the deaths they died?”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“Our own hearts judged us as sinners before anyone else did.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“This cage of bones and flesh that holds me prisoner... makes a mockery of me and my
desires. How can anyone be held responsible for body they're born with ?”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“We are all like that. Abandoned strangers who adopt each other, use each other and stand by each other for as long as we can.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“It's funny how we give meaning to the chirping of birds and, in turn, silence human beings.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“Imprisonment leads to either love or hate of the incarcerator. I chose love.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“We hope to drown the murmurs of our paralysed conscience by screaming about other people's sins.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“He taught me to read the Holy Book. I wish that he hadn't, ji. It hurt me and confused me to learn about ideas of compassion and dignity. Everything around me was so different. After a few months I stopped going to him. I don't know whether the stories he told me saved me or destroyed me. Thinking beyond survival is its own burden, ji.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“People kill over the most ridiculous things. A careless word. Or poultry.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson."
"In the nights though, I couldn't help but weave the golden cloth of my dreams. Each stitch from heart to thought, and thought to heart, was painful to bear, even if it was joyous at times. Because each thread was fraught with the fears of being broken midway, lost and never found again.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“To destroy the self , mustn't one first determine the self.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“May be that was how we all perceived each other. Walking stories to read and discard.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“Lahore was a city I used to call home. My laughter had echoed in the great carnival of this city. My sobs had reverberated in its stillness. I had found and lost here what I had thought was love. I had found and lost here what I now knew to have been love. This was the city of people I had loved, and who claimed to have loved me, but had then asked me to divide myself to prove it. Lahore was a city of the dead. It was the city of ghosts and shadows, of bitter memories and relationships. Lahore was a grand cemetery of dreams, innocence, beliefs and truth.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“In the nights though, I couldn't help but weave the golden cloth of my dreams. Each stitch from heart to thought, and thought to heart, was painful to bear, even if it was joyous at times. Because each thread was fraught with the fears of being broken midway, lost and never found again.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“It is not often that I have two options to choose from. It is nice to be compelled towards something, otherwise one drifts through life unimpeded.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“I had never said those words because there were no words left. My beloved and I were both exiles from language. Our love couldn't be expressed in words. Our love had been woven into the melodies rendered by his flute, and it was subsumed in the atoms of the air we breathed. It had been consecrated in this shrine. It had never been named. It was an unnamed thing that had remained unspoken, unuttered, unsaid. I did not need to name it when he could already hear it.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“In the nights though, I couldn't help but weave the golden cloth of my dreams. Each stitch from heart to thought, and thought to heart, was painful to bear, even if it was joyous at times. Because each thread was fraught with the fears of being broken midway, lost and never found again.
Nida”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“I'd morphed, altered, nipped and tucked away bits of my personality for so long, I no longer recognized myself. I feared that one day, even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to identify myself. I'd be forever trapped in an image of another's making, and there would be no escape because I would have forgotten to want to escape.
Nida”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“It is not often that I have two options to choose from. It is nice to be compelled towards something, otherwise one drifts through life unimpeded.
Bhanggi”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water