Zia Quotes

Now the tattoos," Zia announced. "Brilliant!" I said. "On your tongue," she added. "Excuse me?

I woke to a bucket of ice water in my face. “Sadie! Get up,” Zia said. “God!” I yelled. “Was that necessary?” “No,” admitted Zia.

Tell you what," I said. "After the testing after the Demon Days, when things settle down -" "Things won't settle down." "- I'm going to take you to the mall." She blinked. "The mall? For what reason?" "To hang out," I said. "We'll get some hamburgers. See a movie." Zia hesitated. "Is this what you'd call a 'date'?" My expression must have been priceless, because Zia actually cracked a smile. "You look like a cow hit with a shovel.

Carter, not to be unkind," I said, "but the last few months you've been seeing messages about Zia everywhere. Two weeks ago, you thought she was sending you a distress call in your mashed potatoes." "It was a Z! Carved right in the potatoes!

The Temple of Dendur," Zia said. "Actually it was built by the Romans - " "When they occupied Egypt," Carter said, like this was delightful information. "Augustus commissioned it." "Yes," Zia said. "Fascinating," I murmured. "Would you two like to be left alone with a history textbook?

Egypt is the First Nome. New York is the twenty-first. What’s the last one, the Three-hundred-and-sixtieth?” “That would be Antarctica,” Zia said. “A punishment assignment. Nothing there but a couple of cold magicians and some magic penguins.” “Magic penguins?” “Don’t ask.

How does it taste?” Carter wondered. Zia smiled. “Stick out your tongue.” To answer Carter’s question, the tattoo tasted like burning car tires. “Ugh.” I spit a blue gob of “order and harmony” into the fountain.

Oh, god,” I said. “Sorry, sorry. Do I die now?” --Sadie to Zia

Then there were the shabti, magical figurines that were supposed to come to life when summoned. A few months ago, I’d fallen for a girl named Zia Rashid, who’d turned out to be a shabti. Falling in love for the first time had been hard enough. But when the girl you like turns out to be ceramic and cracks to pieces before your eyes—well, it gives “breaking your heart” a new meaning.

I'll let you and Zia have some quality time," she told me. "Just the two of you and your coat.

Somewhere behind me, Zia yelled, "Hippo!" Which I thought was a little late. ~Carter Kane

Another guy barked orders to a small army of brooms, mops, and buckets that were scuttling around, cleaning up the city. "Like that cartoon," Sadie said. "Where Mickey Mouse tries to do magic and the brooms keep splitting and toting water." "'The Sorcerer's Apprentice,'" Zia said. "You do know that was based on an Egyptian story, don't you?

It's a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

My name is Zia Rashid.” She tilted her head as if listening. Right on cue, the entire building rumbled. Dust sprinkled from the ceiling, and the slithering sounds of scorpion doubled in volume behind us. “And right now,” Zia continued, sounding a bit disappointed, “I must save your miserable lives.

Zia," I said, "that's a goddess. She defeated Bast. What chance do you have?" Zia held up her staff and the carved lion's head burst into flames - a small red fireball so bright, it lit the entire room. "I am a scribe in the House of Life, Sadie Kane. I am trained to fight gods.

What about King Tut’s tomb?” I protested. “That boy king?” Zia rolled her eyes. “Boring. You should see some of the good tombs.

Zia turned toward us, her expression grim. “I will show you to your quarters. In the morning, your testing begins. We will see what magic you know, and how you know it.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but I exchanged an uneasy look with Sadie. “Sounds fun,” Sadie ventured. “And it we fail this test?” Zia regarded her coldly. “This is not the sort of test you fail, Sadie Kane. You pass or you die.

Life can only be understood backward; the trouble is, it has to be lived forward.

The generals who had called Zia a mullah behind his back felt ashamed at having underestimated him: not only was he a mullah, he was a mullah whose understanding of religion didn't go beyond parroting what he had heard from the next mullah. A mullah without a beard, a mullah in a four-star general's uniform, a mullah with the instincts of a corrupt tax inspector.

That’s right, Sadie. For our first real date, I picked up Zia in a boat pulled by a deranged griffin. So what? Like your dates aren’t weird?

The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That's the only way a person can be changed." By looking into yourself," Zia said. "Even if you have to look into a mirror that's outside yourself to do it." "And you know," Maida added. "That mirror can be a story you hear, or just someone else's eyes. Anything that reflects back so you can see yourself in it.

Her eyes were luminous gold. I wondered if that was the last color a bug saw when it was trapped in amber—and if the bug thought, wow, that's beautiful, right before it was frozen forever.

With Zia's controversial demise in 1988, Jinnah was finally spared the false beard Zia kept pinning on the founder's otherwise clean-shaven face.

Not long," Zia said. "I wanted to talk to you before [Carter and Amos] come back." [Sadie] raised an eyebrow. "About Carter? Well, if you're wondering whether he likes you, the way he stammers might be an indication." Zia frowned. "No, I'm—" "Asking if I mind? Very considerate. I must say at first I had my doubts, what with you threatening to kill us and all, but I've decided you're not the bad sort, and Carter's mad about you, so—" "It's not about Carter." "Oops. Could you just forget what I said, then?

Somewhere behind me, Zia yelled, "Hippo!" Which I thought was a little late. She stumbled toward me over the rocking deck, the tip of her staff on fire. Our ghostly pal Setne floated behind her, grinning with delight. "There is it!" Setne shook his diamond pink rings. "Told ya Apophis would send a monster to kill you." "You're so smart!" I shouted. "Now, how do we stop it?

Zia looked appalled. “Setne? As in the Setne? Does Carter realize—?” “Yep.” “And Thoth suggested this?” “Yep.” “And you’re actually going along with it?” “Yep.

The people have realized that Martial Law is not law. A regime not established by law is devoid of the attribute to dispense law. A regime which puts in a bunker the highest law in the land does not have the moral authority to say that nobody is above the law.

An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.

Is that not the Promethean fable, that the fire stolen from the gods will light men their way even while it burns their hands?

Listening is hard, as my friend once said, because you run the risk of having to change the way you see the world.

Hapi?" I asked. "Why, yes, I am happy!" Hapi beamed. "I'm always happy because I'm Hapi! Are you happy?" Zia frowned up at the giant. "Does he have to be so big?" The god laughed. Immediately he shrank down to human size, though the crazy cheerful look on his face was still pretty unnerving. "Oh, Setne!" Hapi chuckled and pushed the ghost playfully. "I hate this guy. Absolutely despise him!" Hapi's smile became painfully wide. "I'd love to rip off your arms and legs, Setne. That would be amazing!" Setne ... drifted a little farther away from the smiling god. "Oh!" Hapi clapped excitedly. "The world is going to end tomorrow. I forgot!" "You'd never get to Memphis without my help. You'd get torn into a million pieces!" He seemed genuinely pleased to share that news.

Yes, I’d still have Sonia. And Zia. And so many other things that Karim no longer had. I’d still have the Arabian Sea and Sindhri mangoes, and crabbing with Captain Saleem, who had the most popular boat of all because his business card promoted ‘Garunteed no cockroach’, and, yes, there’s still be those bottles of creamy, flavored milk from Rahat Milk Corner and drives to the airport for coffee and warm sand at the beach and Thai soup at Yuan Tung; yes, Burns Road nihari; yes, student biryani; oh, yes, yes, yes, and all that, and all that again. So why complain? Why contemplate words like ‘longing’?

General Zia brought in Islamic laws which reduced a woman’s evidence in court to count for only half that of a man’s.

Our memories do not visit us in chronology, and the story we form by joining up the memories involves choices with the purpose of making a whole and finding a pattern.

A regime that can suspend or abrogate the constitution and run the country on its whims and caprice should be ashamed of bringing on its lips the word "law". It is like prescribing a punishment for adultery after raping the country. It is like saying that Holy Quran is suspended nobody can escape from the Hadees.

How many senators have taken their conception of what America can do from what they’ve seen on the American movie screen?

Zia was also cold and detached; imagine Ayn Rand, though a painter instead of a writer.

Come on. Let's go up to the kitchen, make some tea. We can try another one of Zia's cupcakes. She made some with chocolate frosting." Lily froze in her tracks. "I hate it," she burst out. "I'm here, sipping tea and nibbling cupcakes while Bruno's out there? What, should I maybe crochet a white lace doily while I'm at it?" Tam and Edie exchanged glances. Tam, spoke, her voice dry. "Shot of bourbon, then?

I am as impressed by honesty as anyone, but when there is a hint that a man is taking me into his confidence, my first instinct is to suspect him. Am I to be flattered? And is he about to break another’s confidence?

if a colonizer replaces language, clothes and names of a nation then what remains is a mere shadow of the colonizer.

Yes, they mean well, but the only good that an absence of malice guarantees is a clear conscience.

He, like so many of them, came from that breed of international development experts unsparing in its love for all humanity but having no interest in people.

The economy recovered to a great extent from the disasters of Bhutto’s rule, but the boom of the 1980s under Zia proved as shallow as that under Musharraf – based above all on US aid and remittances from the Pakistani workers who flooded to the Gulf states in response to the oil boom.

Maps, contour maps and all maps, intrigue us for the metaphors that they are: tools to give us a sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings.

I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent: Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds. My father and I chuckled. What happened to him? Gone. My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you’re made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It’s only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties.

I'm an excellent pastry chef. My pie crust is better than my Zia Rosa's. Come on back to the kitchen. I'll make a chocolate cream pie before your very eyes. I'll feed a piece of it to you by hand. And by the time I'm done, you're not going to be asking me if I'm gay anymore." She cleared her throat, gaze darting down. "Is that so." "It is," he said. "On your feet. Come on back to the kitchen. I mean it. I'm dead serious. It's pie time. And I am so ready for you.

My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you’re made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It’s only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. It’s the strangest thing, this idea in quantum physics, and yet somehow unsurprising when you consider it as a metaphor. It’s when the thing interacts that its properties are revealed, even resolved.

Advisers were numberless in Kabul, like stray dogs in Mumbai.

Every man, he said, carries his own pyre.

What is the beginning of rage, the beginning of anger? Not dislike, but love.

We are a dangerous breed, you and I. We are lock pickers. We are dangerous to others and ourselves. It is always a great risk to open a door if you don’t know what’s behind it.

that the truth is finer and that the only answers each of us hears are to the questions we are capable of asking.

Het leven kan alleen achteraf worden begrepen; het vervelende is dat het voorwaarts moet worden geleefd.

La dignità si deve mantenere, sempre, ma l'orgoglio porta male.

as a safety valve to preserve Indian democracy, the basic structure doctrine in Kesavananda should live on.

Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

«Ci sono persone» commenta zia Marta «che non riconoscono la verità neanche se ce l’hanno sotto il naso».

Shigri boy lost his marbles in the end but the plane General Zia is about to board has enough VX gas on it to wipe out a village.

Oh, dear,” Set laughed. “I suppose Zia gets to say ‘I told you so.

Esiste più di un genere di libertà, diceva Zia Lydia. La libertà di e la libertà da.

So,” said Zia, “you’re gonna eat your way through the whole universe, top to bottom. And then what?

My name is Zia Rashid.

Fuck,” Zia said in despair. “There’s two of them. Why did the universe make two of them?

The sanction of force stands behind the medley of personal orders and regulations of Martial Law. The sanction of the people's consent stands behind the hierarchy of laws. In one situation, the population is regimented into acquiescence. In the other, the population voluntarily establishes a contract with Parliament. For this reason, one is called a regime and the other, a government. Martial law rests on the sanction of force and not on the sanction of law.

Dandogli le spalle apro il rubinetto ed aspetto si riempia l’acquaio per lavarli. Thomas mi raggiunge senza fare alcun rumore. Me ne accorgo solo quando poggia contemporaneamente le mani sui bordi del ripiano, bloccandomi tra le sue braccia. Quel contatto improvviso mi fa trasalire ed uno dei due piatti che reggo mi scivola di mano, sprofondando nella schiuma. «Ok, facciamo così» mi sussurra ad un orecchio, avvicinandosi al mio viso. «Oggi è il tuo giorno fortunato: voglio essere comprensivo. Fingerò di non aver rischiato di rompermi l’osso del collo cadendo in una buca di più di due metri. Sorvolerò sulla storia della macchina e dimenticherò di aver trascorso un’ora cercando di convincere mia zia che non sono il crudele maschilista insensibile che crede. Tu, d’altro canto, verrai con me nello studio, ti siederai e ti impegnerai a trovare un accordo ragionevole. Considera che mi sento particolarmente generoso, cosa che capita di rado».

The whole thing is too abstract, continued Zafar, this business of our lives standing for something else. All we know is that we don’t want it to stand for nothing. So we dive headlong into becoming heroes, becoming the big swinging dick on Wall Street or the rock star or the hot-shot human rights lawyer. Which is about making our lives stand for something that our intelligence can grasp, saving us from confronting what we fear might be true—or what we would fear if we gave ourselves the chance—namely, that we’re accidental pieces of flesh, mutton without meaning.

Strada facendo, zio Vernon si lamentava con zia Petunia. A lui piaceva lamentarsi di tutto: i colleghi di lavoro, Harry, il consiglio, Harry, la banca, Harry, erano solo alcuni dei suoi argomenti preferiti.

To go from America’s founding belief that it can form an ever more perfect union to a belief that it can reconstruct another country in the image of its hopes for itself – to cover that distance – does not take long.

No matter how long we stay in this country, and no matter how “accent-free” our children learn to speak English, we are still regarded as foreigners, and as “foreigners” we are suspect as an enemy from overseas. —Helen Zia, 1984

Ah, che città, diceva a mia figlia zia Lina, che città splendida e significativa: qua si sono parlate tutte le lingue, Emma, qua s'è costruito di tutto e s'è scassato di tutto, qua la gente non si fida di nessuna chiacchiera ed è assai chiacchierona, qua c'è il Vesuvio che ti ricorda ogni giorno che la più grande impresa degli uomini potenti, l'opera più splendida, il fuoco, e il terremoto, e la cenere e il mare in pochi secondi te la riducono a niente.

But that delusional urge is only one of the varieties of self-deception that encourage us to believe we know another human being and, for that matter, ourselves. This faith in having the measure of others really becomes unstuck when you begin to consider how many you’d acknowledge as having the measure of you. That number dwindles before your eyes.

La normalità, diceva Zia Lydia, significa ciò cui si è abituati. Se qualcosa potrà non sembrarvi normale al momento, dopo un po' di tempo lo sarà. Diventerà normale." Margaret Atwood, Il racconto dell'ancella, traduzione di Camillo Pennati

YOU’RE FORGETTING SOMETHING, Horus told me. A little busy here! I thought back. You might think it’s easy steering a magic boat through the sky. You’d be wrong. I didn’t have Amos’s animated coat, so I stood in the back trying to shift the tiller myself, which was like stirring cement. I couldn’t see where we were going. We kept tilting back and forth while Sadie tried her best to keep an unconscious Zia from flopping over the side. It’s my birthday, Horus insisted. Wish me happy birthday! “Happy birthday!” I yelled. “Now, shut up!

People will tell you that the world is divided into good and bad, and that I’m bad, but it’s not, and I’m not. The real truth is that I make choices based on my circumstances. We all do. It trumps everything else, whether you know it or not. There has never been a good or bad.

Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing about reckless desire, the temptations of power, and the immanence of rage, or reading Naipaul might convince you to seize the ego that so wants to be loved, drag it outside, put it up against a wall, and shoot it.

Afghanistan doesn’t have the oil of the Khazars, he said, and we’re not ready to prostitute our women like the Thais. Unlike the Westerner’s, ours is not a spiritual poverty but a material one. When our needs in that area are met, we will not have the dilemma or crisis of Western man.

Of all the things I expected out of you, swords were not it." "Why? I like shiny things that make other things go squish." [...] “Tell me that’s a lightsaber.” Zia came around to join them, and she was quick to correct. “No, not quite. It’s a bejeweled magical sword, activated by runes that—” “It’s totally a lightsaber,” Wicky cut in, handing it over with glee. [...] Nico was already bounding ahead, lightsaber in full swing. “My name is Nicholas di Rocci. You threatened my mage. Prepare to die!” And then he promptly started making lightsaber noises as he cut into two ROUSes. “Vrãu, vrãu—

In the peaceful moments of night, Whenever i remember you..! At that moment, Me beg to Allah Almighty For your eternal happiness..! I pray to Him, All griefs, all tears and all sorrows, In your fate, Shift to mine..! And, All possible joys of mine, Shift to yours..! O Aysel Stay blessed and happy..!

love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment.

Under Zia’s regime life for women in Pakistan became much more restricted. Jinnah said, “No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a third power stronger than both, that of women.” But General Zia brought in Islamic laws which reduced a woman’s evidence in court to count for only half that of a man’s. Soon our prisons were full of cases like that of a thirteen-year-old girl who was raped and became pregnant and was then sent to prison for adultery because she couldn’t produce four male witnesses to prove it was a crime.

Tutto questo accadde tantissimo tempo fa. E non sono mai ritornato a Oxgodby, non ho mai scritto, non ho mai incontrato nessuno che potesse darmene noti- zia. Perciò, nella memoria, rimane come l'ho lasciata, una stanza sigillata arredata dal passato, ermetica, im- mobile, inchiostro da lungo tempo seccatosi su una penna abbandonata.

A te - si era arrabbiata - tuo padre t'ha privato di una famiglia grande, di tutti quanti noi, nonni, zii, cugini, che non siamo intelligenti ed educati come lui; ci ha tagliati via con l'accetta, t'ha fatta crescere isolata, per paura che ti guastassimo. Sprizzava astio e tuttavia quelle parole adesso mi davano sollievo, me le ripetei nella testa. Affermavano l'esistenza di un legame forte e positivo, lo pretendevano. Mia zia non aveva detto: tu hai la mia faccia o almeno un po' mi assomigli; mia zia aveva detto: tu non sei solo di tuo padre e tua madre, tu sei anche mia, tu sei di tutta la famiglia da cui lui è venuto fuori, e chi sta dalla parte nostra non è mai solo, si carica di forza.

Belle sono le mani di quelle che hanno amato, anche se soffrono, loro hanno conosciuto la cuntintizza. Vale la pena innamurarsi.

Amuri è cuntintizza.

No sight better expresses the politics of aid, the dynamics of the West and the developing countries, than the image of children, happy or in need.

It is no consolation to reflect that every cause itself is an effect, making the search for causes and reasons a fool’s errand.

Our choices are made, our will flexed, in the teeth of events that overwhelm us and devour us.

It’s always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, don’t you think?

You think people never say what they mean. The truth is, nine times out of ten what they say is all they mean.

We’re not put on this earth to fuck around. We have to make something of our lives.

destruction. Turning to God can save your life, but, in the process, it can annihilate your soul.

If I had my time again, I’d believe in reincarnation.

The sky was overladen with stars. If you looked closely there were stars in the grass as well--dew turned to ice on the tips of grass blades.

Losing a father of family is like there is no dealer in a poker game.

The Messenger said, "The human heart is the House of the All-Merciful." (p. 249)

Knowledge is life with wings but imagination is the soul of those wings..!

My soul will finds yours..!

Relation between you and me is just like as between "Breath and Life" you are my life i am your breath, cant live without each other...!

This is a hard country, brush country, mean country, heartbreak country. Ugly in summer, drought-stricken, dusty, glaring, but in winter it is hideous.

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times . . . In life after life, in age after age forever. – Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Unending Love’, translated by William Radice

Siete una generazione di transizione, diceva Zia Lydia. Per voi è più difficile. Sappiamo che da voi si attendono dei sacrifici. È duro subire l'oltraggio dagli uomini. Per quelle che verranno dopo, sarà più facile, perché accetteranno il loro dovere con cuore volonteroso. Non diceva: perché non avranno ricordi. Diceva: perché non vorranno cose che non possono avere.

Afghanistan’s barren, ragged desolation moaned a long dirge of ancient wonder, the earth’s broken features ready to receive fallen horsemen, the lost traveller, and all the butchered tribes.

They spent the day with Lucia, who promised that the following day she would take them up to Scala, an even tinier, loftier town where her parents now lived. That evening, Mac took her to a restaurant called Il Flauto di Pan- Pan's Flute- perched at the Villa Cimbrone among the gardens and crumbling walls. It was probably the most beautiful restaurant she'd ever seen. The centuries-old villa was embellished with incredible gardens of fuchsia bougainvillea, lemon and cypress trees and flowering herbs that scented the air. Their veranda table had an impossibly gorgeous view of the sea.

somewhere there is someone, who dreams of... your smile, your fragrance, your long black hairs, your magical eyes, and finds your presence...! those moments of life are worthwhile, sweet and priceless and in those moments he lives his whole life...! O AYSEL listen, at any stage, any turn and any turn of life, when you feel Loneliness, remember that its true, somebody somewhere is, thinking of "YOU"...!

Mathematics, which doesn’t include the tawdry efforts of statistics or probability, pure mathematics, the product of the human mind turning to face itself, turning into itself, and finding in the realm of necessary consequences, where no contingent fact is to be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or touched – it discloses a beauty that exhausts human comprehension and a certainty the senses can never touch.

Pointing to the sandstone buildings around us, some of which had stood there for several hundreds of years, she commented on how old everything in Oxford looked. Can’t they afford anything new? she asked earnestly.

In Bilaath, I said. Bilaath, or Vilayet as it has otherwise been transcribed into English, derives from Persian and Ottoman Turkish, in which the word meant governorate or district. In Bengali, the word is used to refer to Britain. In fact, one English colloquial name for Britain, Blighty, somewhat archaic these days and mainly reserved for comedy, is derived from the word Bilaath, which was current in India in the time of the British Raj.

I passed by General Zia's tomb and knew that I never would have become Muslim if I was raised in this country [Pakistan]. As a rebellious American adolescent, I had chosen Islam because it was the religion of Malcolm X, a language of resistance against unjust power. But in Pakistan, Islam was the unjust power, or at least part of what kept the machine running. Pakistan's Islam was guilty of everything for which I had rebelled against Reagen-Falwaell Christianity of America.

You see, calling things by their proper names is the beginning of wisdom. That’s a Chinese proverb and they invented writing. The wisdom, in case you’re wondering, is that when you get names right, you narrow the gap between you and the thing.

For Sufis, the primary zikr, or practice of divine remembrance, is La ilaha illa'Llah, which means in Arabic, "no god but God." Azar Kayvan taught his disciples to recite Nist hasti magar Yazdan, which means in Persian "no existence but God." (p. 93)

Her Deep Sea Eyes…！ Where i Love to Die 。。。 She…. Is like a lite ray, From the skies..! Looks like a fairy, From the paradise..! When she moves her feet, Moon walks side by side..! Flower blossoms, On her pink smiles..! Evening falls, When she closes her eyes..! Her awakening, Makes the sun rise..!!! Her scent full breaths, Make the fragrance live..! Her deep sea eyes, Where i love to die..! She...! Is like a lite ray, From the skies..! Looks like a fairy, From the paradise..! 。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。

In Pakistan both branches [of the Ahmadis] fell to persecutions, sanction by the state in 1984 with General Zia Ul-Haq's Ordinance XX, which forbade Ahmadis of either branch from calling themselves Muslims, their religion Islam, or their temples mosques. Under penalty of law, they could not perform the call to pryaer, pray in the manner of Muslims, quote the Qur'an or hadith, greet each other with "as-salamu alaikum," or receite the shahadah... In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, it was illegal for some people to say, "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his Messenger.

He looked at Abby. “Do I get a kiss?” “From the monkey?” Abby shrugged. “You can ask him.” “I’d prefer a kiss from an Italian goddess.” “Yeah? I’ll take you to meet Zia Sophia. If she likes you, then maybe we’ll talk.” “Talk? Doesn’t a knight-errant deserve a reward?” “See, that’s what we’re going to talk about. I don’t give any parts of this package”—she motioned the length of her body—“out as rewards. I’m not saying there won’t be any rewarding. I’m just saying it will be mutual if there is.” “Mu-tu-al.” Jing pressed his hand to his heart. “I swear to give as good as I get.

In the peaceful moments of night, Whenever i remember you..! At that moment, Me beg to Allah Almighty For your eternal happiness..! I pray to Him, All griefs, all tears and all sorrows, In your fate, Shifts to mine..! And, All possible joys of mine, Shifts to yours..! O Aysel..! Stay blessed and happy..!

For a long time I felt, which is to say I consciously thought, that our difficulties were of my doing, my fault, that I had brought upon my parents some grief to warrant their treatment of me – to warrant the violence. I know now, of course, that self-blame is rather common among children in such circumstances as mine.

Zia gasped, her face beading with sweat. “When the people needed to stop Sekhmet, they got huge vats of beer and colored them bright red with pomegranate juice.” “Yeah, I remember now,” I interrupted. “They told Sekhmet it was blood, and she drank until she passed out. Then Ra was able to recall her into the heavens. They transformed her into something gentler. A cow goddess or something.” “Hathor,” Zia said. “That is Sekhmet’s other form. The flip side of her personality.” Sadie shook her head in disbelief. “So you’re saying we offer to buy Sekhmet a few pints, and she’ll turn into a cow.” “Not exactly,” Zia said. “But salsa is red, is it not?

Yes, I’d still have Sonia. And Zia. And so many other things that Karim no longer had. I’d still have the Arabian Sea and Sindhri mangoes, and crabbing with Captain Saleem, who had the most popular boat of all because his business card promised ‘Guaranteed no cockroach’, and, yes, there’d still be those bottles of creamy, flavoured milk from Rahat Milk Corner and drives to the airport for coffee and warm sand at the beach and Thai soup at Yuan Tung; yes, Burns Road nihari; yes, student biryani; oh, yes, yes, yes, all that, and all that again. So why complain? Why contemplate words like ‘longing’? After all, it was just the ends of my sentences I was losing.

At every stage, the world that breaks in through our senses struggles to find a footing in our brains. We might liken memories to the messages recorded on tape, but we mistake the message for the medium, or the other way round, for memory is the tape itself. When I listen to my memories now, I believe that all they tell me are the stories about themselves.

As I reached the highest step, I turned. Spread along the platform was a mass of bobbing black hair like a long wave of silk. Suddenly I felt the first stirrings of what I would later come to recognize as kinship, a feeling that alarmed me, a sense that I was of a piece with a group of people for the most basic reasons, simple to the senses and irrational.

La vita è come una treccia, ogni ciocca è importante e ha un significato. La prima è quella del dovere, che abbiamo tutti e che significa obbedienza; la seconda è quella della roba – chi l'ha deve stare attento a non farsela arrubbare e chi non l'ha ha soltanto la fame nelle budella e la vulissi assai – e la terza è quella dell'amore. E se una ha tutte e tre le ciocche belle forti, la treccia è bellissima e vive felice. Ma assai fimmine hanno la prima ciocca bella folta, mentre le altre due sono sottili. Se riescono a intrecciarsi la treccia bella non è, ma tiene, e la vita continua. Se invece la ciocca dell'amore addiventa troppo forte e quella del dovere è debole, la treccia non regge e si disfa: tre devono essere le ciocche, così è

Just like that: the fate of the world goes out the window. We have to find Zia. I could have pointed out several things: He was going on the word of an evil spirit that was probably speaking directly from Apophis. If Apophis knew where Zia was kept, why would he tell us, except to delay and distract us? And if he wanted Zia dead, why hadn’t he killed her already? Also, Set had given us the name al-Hamrah Makan. Set was never up to any good. He was clearly hoping to divide us. Finally, even if we had the name of the village, that didn’t mean we could find it. The place had been wiped out almost a decade ago. But looking at Carter, I realized there was no reasoning with him. This wasn’t a reasonable choice. He saw a chance to save Zia, and he was going to take it.

I love America for an idea. The reality is important but ambiguous. In Senegal, there stands a building where slaves were stored before they were sent on to the New World. It was built in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence. I love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment. It may be an idea not everyone cares for, but it is one I need, I want. I love her for her thought, first, of where you’re going, not where you’re from; for her majestic optimism against the gray resistances of Europe, most pure in Britain, so that in America I feel like—I am—a sexual being.

Wordsmiths, that is, people who live in a universe of words and are seriously obsessed by them, have often published lists of their most favoured words. The author, Williams Espy’s list contained: 'gonorrhea', ‘lullaby', 'meandering', 'mellifluous', 'murmuring', ‘onomatopoeia’, 'wisteria'... For me it was cornucopia. Roll these words round your tongue, they are sharp and silvery against the teeth; whisper them, speak them full-throatedly; these words delight your senses like a sip from a vintage Beaujolais.

Even though this book examines a singular period of history, it reveals the manifold differences and conflicts that exist within even a small segment of one city's population. As the stories of "hot" and "cold" war experiences show, to label all the people of a country or culture as the same is a folly with potentially global consequences. This alone is a valuable lesson of the Shanghai exodus, a simple insight that bears repeating, especially when migrants and refugees everywhere are still often painted in one dismissive stroke.

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever. —Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile

I have always believed—and believed it so clearly that I should say that I have always known—that certainty is a subjective state, and no less so the certainty about other subjective states, so that when one is asked whether one is sure about anything, one can only answer: Yes, but I might be wrong. One could even go so far as to say that one is absolutely sure but that there always remains the qualification that one might be wrong, for, if nothing else, between the subjective state of certainty and the world presented to us there is the mediation of this laughably fallible perception.

Love is a sickness, A strange connection, It’s a big hobby, o sweet heart..! Listened many stories, From elders and wise persons, But never believe, Never thought, Those stories are considerable, Sitting on the throne of myself, Never came to know...! Above that throne, at too much height, Somewhere In the crowd of fairies, In the Anklet of your feet, In the Shadow of your tresses, in your small village, Sun, moon and all stars dance crazily..! I never came to know all this, o sweetheart, On the sound of your walking feet, on your pink smile, On the movement of your eyebrows, on your lovely voice, on your killing eyes, All flowers of garden care well, for a very little moment of closeness with you sacrifice their life, I never came to know all this, o sweetheart…! Moonlit after touching your body propagate everywhere, Roses get the fragrance from your sweating, in the form of due drops, I never came to know all this, o sweetheart…! I was very confident, never face this, Wise heart, will never be crazy, but, Then it happened, sweetheart..! Felt very sad, sweet heart..! Heart converted in to blood and started flowing, o sweet heart..! Convinced too by the movement of your eyebrow, Came for donation, became a recipient, o sweet heart..! Convinced by the sayings of elders, That, Love is a sickness, a strange connection between souls It’s a incurable addiction, o sweet heart..!

Anyone who investigates the revealed religions with an open mind and a discerning heart is bound to discover the truth in all of them. Of course, there are notable differences between them. Each faith is distinguished by the personality of its messenger and the circumstances of its revelation. With the passing of time, faith traditions are also subject to the proliferation of distorted interpretations. Nonetheless, to seeing eyes it is plain to see that all of the world‘s great faiths harbor at their core the same message of love […] Through whichever channel Providence pours it out to the thirsty, the divine love that flows through revelation is from first to last a single substance. All fields are watered with one water. (p. 255)

Despite the raised voices and the wild gesticulations, nobody here is wrong. The beauty of ragù is that it's an idea as much as it is a recipe, a slow-simmered distillation of what means and circumstances have gifted you: If Zia Peppe's ragù is made with nothing but pork scraps, that's because her neighbor raises pigs. When Maria cooks her vegetables in a mix of oil and butter, it's because her family comes from a long line of dairy farmers. When Nonna Anna slips a few laurel leaves into the pot, she plucks them from the tree outside her back door. There is no need for a decree from the Chamber of Commerce to tell these women what qualifies as the authentic ragù; what's authentic is whatever is simmering under the lid. Eventually the women agree to disagree and the rolling boil of the debate calms to a gentle simmer. Alessandro opens a few bottles of pignoletto he's brought to make the peace. We drink and take photos and make small talk about tangential ragù issues such as the proper age of Parmesan and the troubled state of the prosciutto industry in the region. On my way out, Anna no. 1 grabs me by the arm. She pulls me close and looks up into my eyes with an earnestness that drowns out the rest of the chatter in the room. "Forget about these arguments. Forget about the small details. Just remember that the most important ingredient for making ragù, the one thing you can never forget, is love." Lisetta overhears from across the room and quickly adds, "And pancetta!

Two things that weren’t even on the agenda survived every upheaval that followed. General Akhtar remained a general until the time he died, and all God’s names were slowly deleted from the national memory as if a wind had swept the land and blown them away. Innocuous, intimate names: Persian Khuda which had always been handy for ghazal poets as it rhymed with most of the operative verbs; Rab, which poor people invoked in their hour of distress; Maula, which Sufis shouted in their hashish sessions. Allah had given Himself ninety-nine names. His people had improvised many more. But all these names slowly started to disappear: from official stationery, from Friday sermons, from newspaper editorials, from mothers’ prayers, from greeting cards, from official memos, from the lips of television quiz-show hosts, from children’s storybooks, from lovers’ songs, from court orders, from telephone operators’ greetings, from habeas corpus applications, from inter-school debating competitions, from road inauguration speeches, from memorial services, from cricket players’ curses; even from beggars’ begging pleas. In the name of God, God was exiled from the land and replaced by the one and only Allah who, General Zia convinced himself, spoke only through him. But today, eleven years later, Allah was sending him signs that all pointed to a place so dark, so final, that General Zia wished he could muster up some doubts about the Book. He knew if you didn’t have Jonah’s optimism, the belly of the whale was your final resting place.

Predictable but Contingent: The First ‘Political’ Killing at Karachi University On 25 February 1981, a group of left-wing students from the NSF and PSF was gathered at the Arts Faculty lobby of KU for a demonstration in downtown Karachi when they heard that a military jeep was parked in front of the Administration building. An army major had come to help his daughter get admitted to the university and though he was there for personal reasons, the students were enraged—this was Zia’s Pakistan, a country under military rule, where the left was living its twilight but remained a force to be reckoned with on the campuses, particularly in Karachi. As the organiser of the demonstration, Akram Qaim Khani, recalls, ‘it was a surprise. It was a challenge to us. I was a student leader and the army was in my university…’. At Khani’s instigation, the fifty-odd crowd set off for the Administration building, collected petrol from parked cars, filled a Coca-Cola bottle with it and tried to set fire to the jeep. Khani claims that he saved the driver (‘he ran away, anyway…’), so no one was hurt in the incident, but while the students—unsuccessfully—tried to set the jeep on fire, a group of Thunder Squad militants arrived on the scene and assaulted the agitators. Khani (who contracted polio in his childhood and thus suffered from limited mobility) had been spared from physical assault in the past (‘even the big badmash thought “we cannot touch Akram, otherwise his friends will kill us’”), but this time he was roughed up by Thunder Squad badmashs Farooq and Zarar Khan, and he was eventually captured, detained, and delivered to the army, which arrested him.

The irony is that scientists are much less certain about what they say than politicians, policy makers, and pundits. The certainty of the kind you see in the face of a politician declaiming on tax increases or hear in the voice of a commentator condemning or endorsing a foreign policy decision, or the certainty you detect in the words of an op-ed writer pontificating on one thing or another—I used to think that they arrived at their certainty after considering an issue in great depth and finding that the evidence fell overwhelmingly in favor of a specific position. You must think me naïve ever to have thought this way. But I did. I used to think that a good argument was the midwife to certainty. If, as I now believe, it is the wish that fathers the thought, then certainty is the lingering imprint of a wish on thoughts and arguments, like DNA retained in progeny, acting invisibly but with visible effects.

We think of memory as if it were a hard drive, he said, and in some ways that’s what it’s like, but it’s like something altogether different, too. It’s a stage and a director, and over time the play changes, the characters are changed, but it’s a funny play because we lose sight of what those characters once were to us. Memory is not static but a thing in motion, and because we are passengers without a frame of reference, the motion is imperceptible, so that at any given point in time, all we have is a set of memories, a thing of the instantaneous present and not of the past. I read somewhere, some researcher explaining that every time we recall something, our future memory of it changes, as if we rewrite or overwrite the memory with a new memory after each use in an ongoing palimpsest. Which, it strikes me, must make it hard to lose the memory of something whose memory you dearly wish to lose, which is to say that if memory serves us well, sometimes some things are blessedly forgotten.

My father tells a story about Richard Feynman, who’d been dubbed the Great Explainer because of his talent for explaining theoretical physics. When a journalist asked him to describe in three minutes what he’d won the Nobel Prize for, Feynman replied that if he could explain it in three minutes, it wouldn’t be worth a Nobel Prize. Feynman, I think, is making the wider point that an explanation of something by reducing it and simplifying it over and over, until all that’s left is some familiar metaphor that is actually without content, helps no one’s understanding of the thing itself and is only the repetition of a familiar image. Even the basic elements of financial derivatives are mathematical. But quite apart from the mathematical content, the other problem is that to understand derivatives requires, I think, an understanding of other more basic ideas in finance, whether or not they in turn have some mathematical content. It’s accretive, to use Zafar’s language. Perhaps this is not exclusive to finance. As far as I can tell, medicine is just the same, as well as the law.

Dovunque arrivasse, in questa congiuntura, l’influsso dell’indefinibile sul contegno di Isabel, non si trattava certo del pensiero, anche se non formulato, di una sua unione con Caspar Goodwood; poiché, se aveva potuto opporre resistenza ad esser conquistata dalle grandi mani tranquille del suo corteggiatore inglese, era per lo meno altrettanto lontana dall’esser disposta a permettere al giovane di Boston di prendere esplicito possesso di lei. Dopo aver letto la sua lettera, il sentimento nel quale cercava rifugio era quello di considerare criticamente questo suo esser venuto all’estero; poiché parte dell’ascendente che egli aveva su di lei stava nel fatto che sembrava privarla del suo senso della libertà. C’era un impeto di sgradevole intensità, quasi una crudeltà fisica, in quel suo modo di ergerlesi di fronte. A volte era stata perseguitata dall’idea, dal pericolo, della sua disapprovazione e si era domandata - riguardo che mai per nessun altro aveva avuto in egual misura - se a lui sarebbe piaciuto ciò che lei faceva. La difficoltà stava nel fatto che, più di ogni altro uomo che avesse mai conosciuto, più del povero Lord Warburton (aveva cominciato ormai ad elargire a Sua Grazia il beneficio di questo epiteto) Caspar Goodwood adoperava con lei una energia - ed ella l’aveva già sentita come una forza - che era propria della sua vera natura. Non era per niente questione delle sue qualità; era questione dello spirito che stazionava nella chiara fiamma dei suoi occhi, come una persona che non si stancasse mai di guardar dalla finestra. Le piacesse o no, egli insisteva, sempre, con tutto il suo peso, con tutta la sua forza: anche nei rapporti più comuni con lui, bisognava tener conto di questo. L’idea di una limitazione della libertà era per lei particolarmente sgradevole, ora che aveva appena dato una sorta di risalto alla sua indipendenza guardando senza batter ciglio la grossa esca offertale da Lord Warburton, e riuscendo tuttavia a distoglierne lo sguardo. A volte era sembrato che Caspar Goodwood si schierasse dalla parte del destino di lei, che fosse il fatto più ostinato che ella avesse conosciuto; in tali momenti diceva a se stessa che poteva sfuggirgli per un po’, ma che alla fine doveva venir con lui a patti, e sarebbero stati senza dubbio patti a lui favorevoli. Il suo impulso era stato di valersi delle cose che potessero aiutarla a opporre resistenza a questa costrizione; e quest’impulso aveva avuto gran parte nel suo caloroso assenso all’invito della zia, giuntole in un momento in cui si attendeva di giorno in giorno di vedersi di fronte il signor Goodwood, e in un momento in cui era lieta di avere una risposta pronta per una cosa che lui, ne era certa, le avrebbe detto.

Mi occupo di ciò che c'è da fare, di quello che è alla portata delle mie capacità di bambina. Concedo respiro allo zio e alla mamma, mi sento buona e amata. Una brava bambina diligente. Quando la zia muore, io ho dodici anni e mi sento di colpo sola. "Questo lavoro, si vede che ti fa star male, allora perchè lo fai?" "Faccio questo lavoro perchè l'ho scelto, signora, perchè ho fatto una promessa. E non sono abituata a scappare solo perchè le cose sono troppo difficili." "Ma non puoi nemmeno rovinarti la vita per una promessa. Neanche se quella promessa l'hai fatta a te stessa". Credi di avere tutto sotto controllo. Pensi di essere nel posto giusto, nel pieno del tuo potenziale, a fare quel che vuoi. E poi basta una cosa così, bastano una domanda e due parole dette da un'estranea. E di colpo, nel riflesso dello specchio, ti sembra di scorgere un viso che non riconosci più. (...) Però, se siamo qui, significa che siamo state tutte toccate, in un modo o in un altro, dalla sua maniera accogliente di stare al mondo. "Speravo di non trovarti ancora qui. A volte ci sono cose che facciamo perchè dobbiamo. Altre che invece facciamo perchè vogliamo. Il fatto è che siamo spesso i nostri peggiori nemici, perchè preferiamo fare quello che ci riesce, o ciò che le persone che amiamo si aspettano da noi, piuttosto che fare quello che ci piace davvero. Preferiamo sentirci adatti a un ruolo già scritto, andare sul sicuro. E alla mia età posso dirtelo serena: è un gran peccato". "Perchè si preoccupa tanto? Perchè si interessa del mio lavoro?" "Perchè l'interessamento dev'essere a senso unico? Solo tu puoi prenderti cura di me?" "Beh, l'infermiera sono io". "E questo stabilisce parti impermeabili? Sei tu quella che cura, allora credi di non poter star male? Di non aver mai bisogno di aiuto?" "E da cosa avrei bisogno di essere salvata, io?" "Forse da te stessa. Forse la rabbia non è l'unica gabbia dentro la quale si può rimanere prigionieri. Il senso di responsabilità, il timore di deludere o ferire chi ci ama, possono essere anche peggio. Io ho fatto esperienza di entrambi, per questo so riconoscerli negli occhi delle persone". Basta questa frase, e sento la mia intera vita traballare. Pensi che a te non succederà mai. Credi di sapere chi sei, l'hai sempre saputo, hai cominciato presto a nutrire i tuoi obiettivi e ti sei costruita con cura, un pezzettino per volta. Sei convinta che questo ti terrà al riparo da tutto. E invece, in un pomeriggio di metà agosto, capisci che non stai combattendo i mostri ma che il tuo mostro ha divorato te. Rifletto sulle sue parole e mi rendo conto che a portarmi qui, a trattenermi negli anni, è stata quella bambina che credeva di poter essere amata solo facendo la brava, quella che esisteva esclusivamente attraverso l'approvazione degli altri, tormentata dall folle e inconfessata paura che, se avesse smesso di compiacerli, il loro amore sarebbe scomparso. Quella che non si era mai concessa la possibilità di fare una cosa sbagliata, di correre un rischio, di accettare di sentirsi sola o spaesata. Quella che adesso, d'un tratto, in una camer d'ospedale, davanti a una donna vicina alla fine, si accorge di aver scalato una montagna che non era la sua. Un paio di occhi buoni, quella mattina, mi cambiano la vita in un attimo.

I WOKE TO A BUCKET OF ICE WATER IN MY FACE. “Sadie! Get up,” Zia said. “God!” I yelled. “Was that necessary?” “No,” Zia admitted.

c'avissi a cadiriri 'a lingua a quelli che dicono la parola "diverso!" esclamò Maria. "Tutti uguali siamo, ricordatelo, a anessuno capita quello non è già capitato agli altri, non c'è mai niente di nuovo a questo mondo vecchio assai, ma i cristiani non lo capiscono.

Amai tua madre assai, ma lei non fu mai il mio grande amore,il più importante. Quello non mi abbandona ancora e alleggerisce il peso degli anni. Quando avverrà sarà il momento di morire......L'amore per se stessi. Il rispetto per se stessi. Tu devi amarti. Piacerti. Soltanto allora gli altri ti ameranno. A casa tua l'ospite migliore sei tu, prima di tutti gli altri. Quelli vengono dopo.

The journey to God has an end, but the journey in God is endless. (p. 39)

Knowledge of the Supreme brings immortality. "The wise one - He is not born, He does not die." For one who has died before death, the death of the body is merely a formality. To live in God is to live an endless Life. (p. 38)

he will listen as well, smiling warmly, as a guest invokes—as a theoretical physicist’s guest will do—Einstein’s theory of relativity as metaphor for some proposition in the social sciences.

Relativity, my father will hear, demonstrates such and such (in some field as far removed from science as everything but science).

Einstein wished to hell that he’d called it the theory of invariance, which is to say, he wished he’d given it a name whose meaning was exactly the opposite of relativity and which, he said, would have been just as accurate.

gnosis

Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding. –

Where America's WWII generation is often lauded as its greatest, the Chinese contemporaries of that generation deny any claims to such superlatives. Especially when China's 5,000 year history spans hundreds of generations. Nevertheless, this particular demographic defined by exodus and liberation, possesses the greatness that they share with all who survived the savagery of war, social upheaval, violent extremism, and the desperate scramble to find safe haven anywhere.

Certainly, what was true for the refugees and exiles of Shanghai remains true for people fleeing catastrophe in contemporary times. Whether these migrants are driven from Syria, Myanmar, Bosnia, Sudan, Somalia, Guatemala, or too many other places. These refugees have all faced the agonizing choice of whether to stay, or to flee.

In a world fractured by turmoil, there's much to learn from the profound human experience shared by the uprooted and displaced.

There are many lessons to be learned from refugees and migrants that can contribute to the understanding needed to navigate the global tectonics to bring people together, not drive them into flight.

Commodore Murdoch was an older woman with lines across her face from scowling and various levels of displeasure throughout her life. It came as no surprise that she fixed Zia with a frown.

Cuntintamuni di ’stu re, ca chiddu chi veni ’un si sapi com’è.

employees—cooks, maids, amahs, tailors, drivers, accountants, managers, and advisers. A few had their

Again historical antecedents played a part. There was dissent from the beginning. Jinnah’s claim to be the ‘sole spokesman’ for Muslims had vied with Maulana Mawdudi’s authoritarian reading of a ‘holy community of Islam’. In turn, General Ayub Khan (1958-68), in collaboration with various pirs (Muslim holy men), competed with the revivalist Jamaat-i-Islami to gain a monopoly over the discourse of ‘modernist’ Islam. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Awami League’s espousal of ‘Bengali Islam’ stood (again mainly versus the Jamaat-i-Islami) in opposition to the authority of ‘Pakistani Islam’. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1972-77), championed ‘folk Islam’, again in collaboration with an assortment of mainly Sindhi pirs, to challenge the dominance of ‘scripturalist Islam’, advocated both by the Jamaat-i-Islami as well as by sections of the country’s modernizing elite. Later, General Zia ul Haq (1977-88), who initially worked with but then against the Jamaat, favoured a ‘legalist’ interpretation of Islam with a strong punitive bias that aimed to stem both its popular as well as its modernist expressions. In time it strengthened the hold of an ulama-inspired, ‘shariatized Islam’ which, by the 1990s, openly challenged the legitimacy of the nation-state and further aggravated Pakistan’s consensus problem.

The debate, throughout the eighties, was no longer about what we had inherited as our 'culture' or what, indeed, was the 'culture' we adhere to, but about how to root out the insidious 'foreign' (and therefore anti-Pakistan) elements which had crept in. Since it was feared that the slightest whiff from across the border would annihilate our 'ideology', the performing arts were confined to horse and cattle shows, and the fine arts, to calligraphy--at an official level that is.

How can there ever be a substitute for a book, which you can read in a bus, lying in your bed or sitting on a rock by the sea? A book allows you to explore your imagination as you interpret the author’s intention. A book offers us refined delights of being a part of something much bigger than ourselves. It gives us the purified exhilaration of nuances and undertone and equivocacy and contrariety; a book gives us imagination and imagination is happiness.

Il tempo stava cambiando. Nuvoloni grigi spuntavano minacciosi dietro la cerchia dei monti alle spalle della città; lì il cielo era livido. Una grossa nuvola coprì il sole e la terrazza si oscurò all'improvviso. Il barone sollevò gli occhi malati e li puntò su Monte Pellegrino. Lo vedeva sfocato in lontananza, stagliato contro il cielo: ma il monte aveva già cambiato colore. Nuove sfumature - blu, viola - lo rendevano austero e minaccioso. Quella montagna dalle proporzioni perfette e dalla solida bellezza era il guardiano del golfo: una mitica fiera accovacciata e immersa a metà nel mare - groppa e gambe emergevano nelle loro forme angolose -, ma pronta a trarsi dal sonno e a drizzarsi contro chi osasse avvicinarsi alla città. Domenico Safamita amava Palermo d'una passione quasi fisica. "Si distruggono monasteri, palazzi, si sventrano quartieri. Non importa che manchi l'acqua, che le fognature siano rudimentali o inesistenti, che il popolino viva in tuguri e muoia di fame e malattie: i palermitani vogliono un nuovo grandioso teatro lirico. Sempre più bella e più abietta, mai come ora Palermo si rivela magnifica e compiaciuta di aver mantenuto la sua identità di città superlativamente cortigiana. A Palermo anche le pietre sudano sensualità." Sulla sinistra la nuova strada, larghissima, finiva a mare. Lì sembrava essere calata la notte e l'acqua era cosparsa di puntini luccicanti: le prime lampare dei pescatori. La nuvola scivolò dal sole e tutto ritornò come prima: il mare era una macchia scura senza bagliori, Monte Pellegrino, appena rosato, si stagliava netto e benigno.

Così era la vita, le cose capitano, e non sempre sono come devono capitare.

The curtains parted to reveal Aimée and the performance that followed proved to be even more exciting than the Kadine had hoped. The Kizlar Agasi was correct. Here was the little miracle that might save them... the next favorite and with some luck, the next Valide Sultana. The performance left the Circassian Kadine in a highly aroused state. She took several minutes to compose herself, touching her jewelry and her hair and smoothing the layers of gold silk that enveloped her body. When her breathing had returned to normal, she rose and approached Aimée, extending a trembling hand for her to kiss. “You are a pleasure to watch,” she whispered. Aimée knelt, completely naked, with her head bowed. “Thank you, my lady.” The Kadine lifted Aimée’s chin, tilting her face up to look at her. “How old are you, child?” “Nineteen, my lady.” The Kadine stroked Aimée’s cheek. “That is difficult to believe. You don’t look more than fifteen.” Aimée grinned broadly, her heart pounding wildly in her chest. “Thank you, my lady.” She likes me, and she is so beautiful. Oh, if only I were as beautiful. “You will join my retinue and reside close to my own quarters so that you may attend me personally.” Aimée loved the thought of being close to the Kadine, although she did not grasp the importance of the

He continues in a softer tone. “And her zia will explain to her how this is all for the best, and how family comes first, and how, if her new husband proves to be anything like her zia’s late husband Enzo, he’ll find himself the victim of an untimely death, too.” He pauses. “A meticulously planned death with no witnesses or evidence of foul play. An ‘accidental’ death so well executed, it even fooled the police.” Without missing a beat, I say, “I didn’t kill my husband.” He smiles. “I’ve never met anyone who can lie as well as you do.” “It’s a gift.

Your father negotiated a marriage contract for you. You’re meeting the man today. As in right now. His car just pulled up.” Lili falls still. She swallows. Other than that, she has no reaction. “You took that better than I expected. Brave girl. So that’s the bad news. The good news is that if I don’t approve of his choice, the contract will be canceled.” She closes her eyes, exhales, and says faintly, “Holy fucking buckets of cat shit.” “Very creative. Anything else?” She opens her eyes and stares at me in panic, clutching my hands so hard, it hurts. “I don’t want to get married, zia.” “Of course you don’t. You’re sane.

Do you think you could turn the pig?" Neil stared at her blankly. "The pig?" "On the spit. The porchetta." Zia Annetta pointed to the back of the kitchen, where there was a large, open wood oven featuring a stuck pig at the center. I grinned at Neil. "Welcome to Tuscany.

Che ne sanno loro delle ore perdute a cercare di dominare la difficile arte della trasparenza e dell'abbagliare. "Siamo come un tramonto senza occhiali da sole", diceva zia Encarna. "Il nostro fulgore acceca, offusca chi ci guarda e li spaventa". È vero, ma possiamo sempre andarcene. E il nostro corpo viene con noi. Il nostro corpo è la nostra patria.

Consolation However I try To create beautiful poetry Its verb and subject and pronouns In their place Nice and beautiful and poetic Eventually Again I, you and we Peace, freedom and love At a table which I have set For the large banquet of words I see around me Those constant companions Those close friends Comfort me For my pointless efforts.

Unfortunately, I had no choice. I’d have to travel two hundred miles through the desert to some isolated oasis and find one needle of a scroll in a haystack of mummies. I didn’t see how we could accomplish this in the time we had left. Worse, I hadn’t yet told Carter my last bit of information about Zia’s village. I could just keep my mouth shut. That would be the selfish thing. It might even be the right thing, as I needed his help, and I couldn’t afford to have him distracted. But I couldn’t keep it from him. I’d invaded his mind and learned his secret name. The least I could do was be honest with him. “Carter…there’s something else. Set wanted you to know. Zia’s village was named al-Hamrah Makan.” Carter turned a bit green again. “You just forgot to mention this?” “Remember, Set is a liar,” I said. “He wasn’t being helpful. He volunteered the information because he wanted to cause chaos between us.” I could already tell I was losing him. His mind was caught in a strong current that had been pulling him along since January—the idea that he could save Zia. Now that

anything, wisdom is a living process that develops through inquiry, self-knowledge, and loving human relations. Wisdom is alive, and it is lived.

Wisdom is not simply more information, though information can expand our perspective. It is not simply more knowledge, though

intuition, serendipity, and imagination. Authentic wisdom is based in goodness, sympathy, and loving kindness. It comes alive when shared with others. With this in mind, we might ask ourselves: What does it mean to be wise? Why do we need wisdom? What calls me to seek wisdom?

There is so much that is beyond our control, so much that can overwhelm us and challenge us ferociously. And yet we also are able to think, to feel, to act, to love, to discover, and, in large measure, to shape our destiny by our choices.

Instead, this new wave sought to establish that they were not proletarian waiters and laundry workers but rather were exceptional Chinese who could become model Americans. Indeed, in 1966 a New York Times Magazine article invented the notion of the “model minority” to praise Asian Americans in pointed contrast to African Americans amid racial tensions and calls for equality. Unfamiliar with the history of discrimination in the United States and unaware that the newly created stereotype pitted Asian Americans against other minorities, some of the Shanghai exiles welcomed the chance to be seen as the “good minority” instead of as enemy intruders.

You’re my brother. I love you. All the embarrassing bits, all the annoying bits, which I imagine is most of you—a thousand Zias might run away from you if they knew the truth. But I won’t. I’ll still be here. Now, tell me your name, you big idiot, so I can save your life.

I looked at Zia. I could tell we were thinking the same thing: terrible idea, but we didn’t have a better one.

While the choice of such a genre may seem like a radical departure for Anaya, in many ways Zia Summer, and the following books in the Sonny Baca series, Rio Grande Fall (1996) and Shaman Winter (1999), are concerned with many of the same issues Anaya tackles in previous works. Detective Sonny Baca, who appears briefly in Alburquerque, solves his first crime in Zia Summer, and his professional development is closely tied to personal revelations about his culture, history, and family. The fictional Sonny’s great-great grandfather is real-life New Mexican hero, Elfego Baca. A Robin Hood figure who was the sheriff of Socorro

No time for explanations,” Amos said, and he blasted Zia with a bolt of lightning. She crashed into the souvenir table. “Hey!” Carter protested. “She’s the enemy,” Amos said. “And we have enough enemies.

Just like that: the fate of the world goes out the window. We have to find Zia.

Aunt Zia has me read aloud the stories I write over and over. She preaches, “Ellen, you are writing for the ear. It has to sound right .” She teaches me to write in active voice and to write in short sentences. An example of active voice is: President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address— not: The Gettysburg Address was delivered by President Lincoln. I’ll add all this information to the notebook I’m making. My notebook has all sorts of information about broadcast journalism , from how to compose shots to how to write a script.

The story of resource extraction has only two cases, okay? In the first case, the extractors arrive and make the local ruler an offer. Being selfish, he takes it and he becomes rich—never so rich as the extractors, but compared to his people, fabulously, delusionally rich. His people become the cheap labor used to extract the resource. This leads to social upheaval. Villages are moved, families destroyed. A few people are enriched, the majority are ruined. Maybe there is an uprising against the ruler. In the second case the ruler is smarter. Maybe he’s seen some neighboring ruler’s head on a pike. He says no thanks to the extractors. To this they have various responses: make him a better offer, find a greedier rival, hire an assassin, or bring in the gunships. But in the end it’s the same: a few people are enriched, most are ruined. What the extractors never, ever do in any case, in all your history, is take no for an answer. Zia, much as I enjoy our historical discussions— Ah, you see? And there it is—your refusal to take no. Talk is done, now we move forward with your agenda.

Help others. It really helps !!!

I don’t dare to move. I don’t want him to stop touching me. But I can’t just sit here like an idiot. What I really want to do is kiss his hand, but I’m not brave enough for that. I wish I were. And then Luca’s hand moves, just a little, to touch my hair again. He winds his finger through one of my curls. “Che boccoli,” he says, sinking again to sit down next to me on the window seat. Our knees touch. “I don’t know the word in English, but my cousins have these too. Bigger, curly, like African hair. And my father. Maybe you are some kind of relative, Violetta-who-looks-like-Zia-Monica. A cousin. My pretty Italian cousin. You know, when I first meet you I say you look Italian.” He’s leaning close to me now, and I’ve completely forgotten how to breathe. I glance sideways at his finger, long, elegant, very pale by contrast with my dark brown curl wrapped around it. “Boccoli,” he said. I must remember to look that up. “I hope I’m not your cousin,” I say simply. “And see how dark you are.” He lets my curl fall and takes my hand, holding it up next to his, my skin much sallower. “I am white from the north,” he says. “My mother’s Austrian blood. But you, the color of your skin is from the south, or at least Centro Italia, my pretty Italian cousin.” “I don’t want to be your cousin,” I say again, nearly in a whisper. “Why? Because we have kissed?” Luca’s still holding my hand, but his eyes go darker, almost cynical. Almost bitter. “A kiss means nothing. Don’t you know that yet, Violetta? Kissing,” he says, so close now I can feel his breath on my face, so close I can almost feel his lips against mine, “is nothing at all…” I know I should pull away. Even before anything happens, he’s told me it means nothing to him. I should push back, get up, go and find the group. But if he doesn’t kiss me now, I will go insane. Our hands twine together. Our heads move in unison, tilting fractionally. Our mouths touch, our eyes close, our breaths merge. Our bodies edge even closer on the seat, wrapping around each other. I’m completely and utterly lost in him.

We also grew up during the time of the Afghan war, when the Mujahideen, Saddam Hussein, and Bin Laden were heroes. Jihad was honourable, and Islamic Hudood Ordinance was imposed. The effects of the Islamisation introduced during the Zia years were to persist beyond his mysterious death. The fabric of society had changed, perhaps irreversibly.

Now the tattoos,” Zia announced. “Brilliant!” I said. “On your tongue,” she added. “Excuse me?

Per me, se esiste il paradiso, dev'esserci assolutamente una tavola imbandita come quella del locale di zia Katja. Non osavamo bere alcol davanti a lei, per non darle dispiacere. Così bevevamo kompot, una specie di composta di frutta, una macedonia di mele, pesche, prugne, albicocche e mirtilli rossi e neri fatta bollire a lungo in un grosso pentolone. Si preparava d'estate, e per il resto dell'anno veniva conservato in bottiglioni da tre litri con un collo largo circa dieci centimetri, chiuso ermeticamente. Si teneva in fresco nelle cantine, poi andava riscaldato prima di berlo. Ogni volta che zia Katja si allontanava, zio Kostič aggiungeva nei nostri bicchieri un po' di vodka facendoci l'occhiolino: - Fate bene a non farvi vedere da lei...- Noi buttavamo giù obbedienti il misto di vodka e kompot, e lui rideva delle facce che facevamo subito dopo.

I am too much of an imitator to be a true writer.

When evil enters the world, do you think it comes with horns and cloven feet, billowing some foul stench?

Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.

Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I am not here to fucking entertain you.

Everyone, he continued, wants his life to stand for something other than what it would, which is about eighty years – in the West, at any rate – eighty years of working, eating, sleeping, shitting, breeding, and dying. Lives of buttoning and unbuttoning – who said that?

We take much for granted, much that is granted by others, and we’re told to do as we’re told, and we agree. And we must agree.

Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.

Difficult questions can have simple answers.

That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

Autobiography, we know, is flawed from the moment the nib of the pen touches the parchment.

This is a miserable country, Zafar. I don’t need to explain that to you. It needs help. Isn’t it that simple? Is anything that simple?

I wasn’t as untrusting. I had faith in the goodness of people, the perfection of love. What happened? Everything ends. And it’s how they end that leaves the lasting effect.

Thanks To Those People Who Give A Taste Of Right Ways.

Thanks To Those People Who Give A Taste Of Right Ways. ” - Zia Mustafa

Kalau dalam bidang keagamaan sendiri terdapat keragaman dalam kesatuan, maka dalam kebudayaan Islam sudah semestinya pula terdapat keragaman - Zia 'Gokalp (1875-1924)

Kebudayaan mempunyai sifat-sifat khusus, nasional, sederhana, dan timbul dengan sendirinya - Zia 'Gokalp (1875-1924)

Can making half the print small save the whole thing from its inherent contradiction?

A few casualties always come with the war,” Zadok answers. I stare at him for a moment, caught off-guard by his merciless approach. “I doubt you’d say the same if you were one of them.” He looks at me with tired eyes. “That’s where you’re wrong.” His whole body sags, finally showing what age has done to him. “My whole family was a casualty at the Baghdad institute. My parents helped found it. It was the first institute to be targeted by its own government. They went down with it. I was twenty-five. The Jerusalem institute sent help as soon as they found out, before the Iraqi government could search the ruins. I was the only person they found still remotely close to being alive.” His gaze looks lost as he continues. “It took me three years to recover, and four to become a carrier again. It took me that long to re-master my fear of being out of control.” His eyes shift to mine. “Don’t accuse me of not understanding the cost of this war. I understand plenty. I give myself up for it every day.