The Baghdad Clock Quotes

هل هذا الغبار الذي يدخل من النوافذ على شكل حزمة عريضة من شعاع الشمس يعود لكم، هل هو أنفاسكم الثقيلة التي نسيتموها في الفراغ ، أنفاسكم التي نسيت أن تذهب معكم، في كل ذرة غبار هناك ذكرى تريد أن تبقى هنا معلقة في الهواء، هناك حلم لم يفسر بعد، هناك أغنية نسيتها سولاف، وضحكة تركتها سندس، هذا الغبار هو أنتم يا أبو سالي، هذا غبار أرواحكم. baghdad clock

Everything our eyes touch is just an idea. There's nothing real about reality. We are prisoners of our imaginations, and our experiences in the world of reality consist only of ideas. All of existence is an assembly of ideas. That is the sole truth. Don't believe anything else. And don't tell anyone, because people only believe things that come independently to their minds. Yet they don't know where the mind is to be found. There's never a day when they ask themselves, "Do I actually posses a thing called the mind? What is it shaped like? What's its colour?" The mind, my little one, is another idea. A complicated idea made of other ideas as though they were real.

From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations. In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)

To stumble and fall when you are a college student is not the same as when you are in primary or secondary school. Childhood is a time for experiments, when we learn how to get back up quickly after a fall. As we get older, we learn that we are never supposed to stumble. Thus, with the passage of time, we lose the freedom even to trip.

I do not want to enter the future. I am afraid of the past disappearing. I am afraid of the unknown. The future is open to all possibilities, and each possibility on the horizon these days frightens me. There are no miracles that the future will realise. It is a sick old man leaning on the crutch of the past he comes towards us.

The past is the only truth I am certain of. I know it well, and I find reassurance even in its destruction. I have a vague dread of what is coming. It is a deep feeling of defeat, a frantic sense that we are passing into chaos. Everything crashes down before our eyes; the fruits of the future rot on the vine and fall to the ground.

What is the difference between a dream and an idea?

There is no longer a neighbourhood in our neighbourhood. Our neighbourhood has moved into the big blue notebook filled with stories and ghosts, sometimes in Nadia’s handwriting, sometimes in mine, and sometimes in Baydaa’s.

There’s nothing real about reality. We are prisoners of our imaginations, and our experiences in the world of reality consist only of ideas. All of existence is an assembly of ideas. That is the sole truth. Don’t believe anything else. And don’t tell anyone, because people only believe things that come independently to their minds. Yet they don’t know where the mind is to be found.

I crossed the Shutt for you.’ Our friend Marwa came over and told us, ‘Shutt is another name for the river.