The Wasted Vigil

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

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

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.

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

Even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare. It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war-how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where wheat was grown.

The young everywhere…would prefer to live in houses that consist only of doors.

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

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.

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

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.

Wolves exhibiting strange behaviour -- caught in traps and thrashing about, injured by other creatures or by bullets, pups suffering from epilepsy -- are attacked and killed by their pack members. But here everyone is human and must try to understand each other's mystery. Each other's pain.

But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again—their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system.

Only twenty - nine years in the entire human history had been without warfare, and now here he was too, travelling between the episodes of a rapacious civil war.

The West wants unconditional love; failing that, unconditional surrender.

The forgiveness of the weak is the air you strong ones breath, David. Didn't you know? You don't see it but you felt it just then. They allow you to go on living.

You have spent your whole life believing such untrue things. Don't you know how alone you are, David? We are most alone when we are with the myths.

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.

A daughter, a wife, a grandson,' You could say this place took away all I had. I could easily appear to be one of those unfortunate white men you hear about, who thought too lovingly of the other races and civilizations of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up a home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake. His life smashed to pieces by the barbarians surrounding him.

The question of our age might be: what means are justified in putting an end to moral crimes. Our principles are being put to the test. And in many ways, none of this is new - neither the strategies for survival of the powerless, nor the shamelessness of those who wield power. That is where hope is - the knowledge that it has happened before, that it is happening in other places right now, not just yours. It calls for solidarity. Through solidarity and love people managed to undermine unjust systems.

…it doesn’t matter to a person when he is in a hall of mirrors — he himself knows he is the one who is real. The confusion is for the onlookers.

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.