Agha Shahid Ali Quotes

Stationary" The moon did not become the sun. It just fell on the desert in great sheets, reams of silver handmade by you. The night is your cottage industry now, the day is your brisk emporium. The world is full of paper. Write to me.

I flipped through their visions, left my number in their sleep. But no one called back. I called all night, called for years, called till their lids began to ring, ten, twenty, two hundred times, and then they went blind on my dreams. Now their eyes don't open. No one picks up the phone.

Then why let anything remain when whatever we loved turned instantly to stone?

There again is memory at my doorstep -- jasmine crushed under departing feet. The moon extinguishes its silver pain on the window.

In the heart's wild space lies the space of wilderness. What won't one lose, what home one won't give forever!

The moon touched my shoulder and I longed for a vanished love

He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven. He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.

Someone speak to the God. Someone turn the moon. My country is in Muhurram. And I have to call it an Eid.

The man who buries his house in the sand and digs it up again, each evening, learns to put it together quickly and just as quickly to take it apart. My parents sleep like children in the dark. I am too far to hear them breathe

Everyone carries his address in pocket so that atleast his body will reach home.

Trust the poet to make a prophecy: I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir, and the shadowed routine of each vein will almost be news, the blood censored,

The country of the blind has ordered mirrors Its one-eyed king's vision is now prime for time

Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous for the other passengers? O just my heart!

Srinagar hunches like a wild cat: lonely sentries, wretched in bunkers at the city’s bridges, far from their homes in the plains, licensed to kill . . . while the Jhelum flows under them, sometimes with a dismembered body. On Zero Bridge the jeeps rush by. The candles go out as travelers, unable to light up the velvet Void. What is the blesséd word? Mandelstam gives no clue. One day the Kashmiris will pronounce that word truly for the first time.

Waiting for the Revolution can be as agonizing and intoxicating as waiting for one’s lover.

All night I keep the heart shut I am waiting for a greater madness To declare myself

My memory is again in the way of your history

Snowmen My ancestor, a man of Himalayan snow, came to Kashmir from Samarkand, carrying a bag of whale bones: heirlooms from sea funerals. His skeleton carved from glaciers, his breath arctic, he froze women in his embrace. His wife thawed into stony water, her old age a clear evaporation. This heirloom, his skeleton under my skin, passed from son to grandson, generations of snowmen on my back. They tap every year on my window, their voices hushed to ice. No, they won’t let me out of winter, and I’ve promised myself, even if I’m the last snowman, that I’ll ride into spring on their melting shoulders.

Not all, only a few-- disguised as tulips, as roses-- return from ashes. What possibilities has the earth forever covered, what faces?

They make a desolation and call it peace.

At the Barcelona airport just before boarding the plane, Agha Shahid Ali was asked by a guard if he was carrying anything that could be dangerous to the other passengers. He pressed his hand to his chest and said,"only my heart".

My parents sleep like children in the dark I am too far to hear them breathe

I realized that even though Shahid was constantly negotiating his identity, he made it clear that for him, language was the only homeland

From windows we hear grieving mothers and snow begins to fall on us, like ash Black on edges of flames, it cannot extinguish the neighborhoods, the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers

I heard the incessant dissolving of silk I felt my heart growing so old in real time

The sky is stunned, it's become a ceiling of stone. I tell you it must weep. So kneel, pray for rain in Arabic.

Karbala was chosen for Kashmir's seasons mixed into the graveyard's cold beds of roses we are such pilgrims.

We mourn the martyrs of Karbala our skins torn with chains.