Nadeem Aslam quotes:

The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important.

Her mind is a haunted house.

Women joked amongst themselves: 'Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It's for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past- "you were born and then I married you"- but men are fools.

All great artists know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings.

Paper is the strongest material in the world. Things under which a mountain will crumble, you can place on paper and it will hold: beauty at its most intense; love at its fiercest; the greatest grief; the greatest rage.

On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step

Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.

Women joked amongst themselves: 'Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It's for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past- you were born and then I married you- but men are fools.

Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery. But no nation should ever require its citizens to be that brave.

Paper is the strongest material in the world; paper can handle what I can't.

There are no innocent people in a guilty nation.

There is nothing that torments Satan more than the sight of a faithful in prayer.

Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world.

He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn was supposed to live in the scent of the acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly world.

How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.

To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there."

The bigger the sin, the rarer and more expensive the bird that is needed to erase it. Is that how the bird pardoner conducts his business? A sparrow for a small deception, but a paradise flycatcher and a monal pheasant for allowing a doubt about His existence to enter the mind."

The soles of his shoes are worn the way the edges of erasers become rounded with use. As though he walks around correcting his mistakes.

A lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it.

All those who love know exactly the limit they're prepared to go to. They know exactly what is required.

As a writer, my homeland is the desk where I work.

History is the third parent.

Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness.

Nothing is an accident: it's always someone's fault; perhaps-but no one teaches us how to live with our mistakes. Everyone is isolated, alone with his or her anguish and guilt, and too penetrating a question can mean people are not able to face one another the next day.

The neighbourhood is a place of...intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds.

There are times in this life when a person must do or say things he doesn't want to. Human beings and chains, it is the oldest acquaintanceship in the world.

This is among the few things that can be said about love with any confidence. It is small enough to be contained within the heart but, pull thin, it would drape the entire world.

To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there.