Uzma Aslam Khan Quotes

How secure is a forty-year-old state? I remember the garrison towns of the Punjab plains, the fenced-off lands, the young soldiers, and I have my answer. To a republic, forty is infancy. And this is its horror, as it carves itself from ancient land, ancient water.

I'd been missing this, the ease of being with someone without speaking, without suppressing speech. I'd grown up with it in Karachi, where groups of men will congregate in the smallest spaces -- the grass between houses, a roundabout -- spaces made more generous through companionable silence. It existed between women too, this bond. My sister and her friends could spend hours reclining together on a bed, or a carpet. If secrets were murmured, it happened in a style so intuited it was pre-verbal. I hadn't experienced this very much in the West, where it seemed people had a reason for everything, including intimacy.

It was here the land spoke to him most, in a region that lay high in the north of what was now Kazakhstan, though to the nomads with whom he was to spend the next three summers, all of Central Asia was one land, divided not into states but into mountain and steppe, desert and oasis. The steppe nomads made him feel he was looking back in time--his time. It was the strangest sensation, the first day he was invited to break bread with them. It was as though a mountain inside him were melting, leaving him naked and cleansed, entirely in his own skin, the skin he used to inhabit in the valley of his youth...before he had to don a thousand skins. In the steppe, he was undisguised, unwary, unwanting.

Could love, like pain, migrate to a different part of the body?

I feared her love for me was like a Pakistani glacier. It was difficult to say if it was growing or retreating.

My faith is what they bury when they force me to expose it.

Wasn't sunrise meant to be the hour of hope? 'The season of creation' some poet or other had once called it. Fucking poet.