- Lin's escape (174)
"The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance", Didier once said "is that it works so well"
- Didier's widsom (186)
There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the poor
- Abdullah quotes Karla, while walking to the Haji Ali masjid (189)
We have a saying in Persian - Sometimes a lion must roar just to remind the horse of its fear
- Abdullah again (189)
"There is not a lot more you can do for someone than die for them" I replied, grinning at his earnestness as much as the strangeness of his idea.
"Oh yes", he said, putting an arm around my shoulder and let me back towards the car. "There is a lot more"
- continuing the conversation with Abdullah
'There is no believing in God, ' he declared, smiling again. 'We either know god or we do not'
...
'Oh of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists'
He was staring at me intently, his hand still resting warm on my arm. Be careful, i thoughts. You're getting into a philosophical discussion with a man who's famous for them. He's testing you. Its a test, and the water's deep.
'Let me get this straights -- you're saying that because something is impossible it exists?' I asked, pushing a canoe of thought out into the unchartered water of his ideas.
.....
I will explain. Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real is merely part of the illusion. Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing.
....
'Let me put it another way. The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. the smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call the world is just an idea -- and not a very good one, yet. From the point of view of the light, the photon of light that animates it, the universe that we know is not real. Nothing is.'
..
'We lie', he said with a flash of real humour in the golf-flecked amber of his eyes. 'The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man'
.....
'What I am saying is that reality -- as you see it, and as most people see it -- is nothing more than an illusion. There is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way'
....
'All you have to do is close your eyes. We can know God, for example, and we can sadness. We can know dreams, and we can know love. But none of these are real, in our usual sense of things that exists in the world and seem real. We cannot weigh them, or measure their length, or find their basic parts in an atom smasher. Which is why they are possible.'
My canoe of thoughts was taking water, and i decided to bail out, fast.
......
' I said that truth is more often found in music', he repeated, ' than it is in books of philosophy'
'What is the truth?' I asked him, I didn't really want to know. I was trying to hold up my end of the conversation. I was trying to be clever.
'The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,' he said. ' It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men -- it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone -- the noblest man alive or the most wicked -- has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy and every particle of matter in the universe, moving towards God.'
- Khaderbhai (196-201)
And as i watched her, she began to cry. The tears, when they came, slipped from her closed eyelids like so many beads on a prayer chain. Some women cry easily. The tears fall as gently as fragrant raindrops in a sun-shower, and leave the face clear and clean and almost radiant. Other women cry hard, and all the loveliness in them collapses in the agony of it. Karla was such a woman. There was terrible anguish written in the rivulets of those tears and the torment that creased her face.
It was a room of diligently austere splendour
"Abdul has a pet theory, Lin", said Khaled, the dour Palestinian. 'He believes that certain men are cursed with qualities, such as great courage, that make them commit desperate acts. He calls it the hero curse, the thing that complels them to leaed other men to bloodshed and chaos"
"I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is so strange and power a thing that is makes us to be sick, like a germ sort of thing. And suffering is what cures us of it, the too much happiness. The -- how do you say it, bhari vazan"
...."Pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is also possible to suffer without feeling pain." ....
... "The difference between them is this, I think; that what we learn from pain - for example, that fire burns and is dangerous - is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people. If we do not suffer with out pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle. We do not learn from it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God" .....
...." Suffering is exactly like happiness, but backwards. One is the mirror image of the other, and has no real meaning or existence without the other."
"Is easy - suffering is hungry, isn't it? Hungry for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means not suffering. But everybody knows that"
"Hurt!", Johnny boomed happily. "Pain is no problem, Lin. Good you have pains, Ameer, you chutia. Pains in your brains, you should be having"
People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like is to put all your trust in him.
I shook hands with him, his small hand vanishing in mine. Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child
"I thought you didn't like Kids"
"I don't. They're so.... innocent. Except that they're not. They know exactly what the want, and they don't stop till they get it. It's disgusting. All the worst people I know are just like big , grown-up children. It's so creepy it makes me sick to my stomach"
Karla always tells the truth.......even when she's lying
The truth was that i belonged nowhere and to no-one. Surrounded by people and hungry for solitude, I was always and everywhere alone. I was hollow, empty, gouged out and scraped bare by the escape and the flight. I'd lost my family, the friends of my youth, my country and its culture - all the things that had defined me, and given me identity. Like all the fugitive kind, the more successful I was, the longer and further i ran, the less i kept of myself.
Now we both know
Sorrows are the seeds of loving
Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn.
- Karla's tears at Madame Zhou's Palace (280)
It was a room of diligently austere splendour
- Kaderbhai's Council's meeting room (286)
"Abdul has a pet theory, Lin", said Khaled, the dour Palestinian. 'He believes that certain men are cursed with qualities, such as great courage, that make them commit desperate acts. He calls it the hero curse, the thing that complels them to leaed other men to bloodshed and chaos"
- Abdul Ghani's theory about the Hero Curse (294)
"I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is so strange and power a thing that is makes us to be sick, like a germ sort of thing. And suffering is what cures us of it, the too much happiness. The -- how do you say it, bhari vazan"
- Farid's interpretation on Suffering : The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering (296)
"I think that suffering is the way we test our love. Every act of suffering, no matter how small or agonizingly great, is a test of love in some way. Most of the time, suffering is also a test of our love for God."........"Pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is also possible to suffer without feeling pain." ....
... "The difference between them is this, I think; that what we learn from pain - for example, that fire burns and is dangerous - is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people. If we do not suffer with out pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle. We do not learn from it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God" .....
...." Suffering is exactly like happiness, but backwards. One is the mirror image of the other, and has no real meaning or existence without the other."
- Kaderbhai's take on the topic under discussion, Suffering (298)
"Is easy - suffering is hungry, isn't it? Hungry for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means not suffering. But everybody knows that"
- Prabhakar breaks it down for Lin (302)
"Hurt!", Johnny boomed happily. "Pain is no problem, Lin. Good you have pains, Ameer, you chutia. Pains in your brains, you should be having"
- Johnny Cigar wanting Ameer to pay for his gunda gardi (305)
People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like is to put all your trust in him.
- Karla (306)
I thought him ugly, then, when i first knew him, not so much for the unbeautiful set of his features as for their joylessness. It seemed to me that i'd never seen a human face in which the smile has been so utterly defeated.- Lin's early impressions of Nazeer, Kaderbhai's sworn man (321)
I shook hands with him, his small hand vanishing in mine. Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child
- Lin's introduction to Tariq, Kaderbhai's nephew (323)
"I thought you didn't like Kids"
"I don't. They're so.... innocent. Except that they're not. They know exactly what the want, and they don't stop till they get it. It's disgusting. All the worst people I know are just like big , grown-up children. It's so creepy it makes me sick to my stomach"
- A mildly contrasting view from Lisa Carter (329)
Karla always tells the truth.......even when she's lying
- Lisa Carter remembering what Karla once told her (333)
The truth was that i belonged nowhere and to no-one. Surrounded by people and hungry for solitude, I was always and everywhere alone. I was hollow, empty, gouged out and scraped bare by the escape and the flight. I'd lost my family, the friends of my youth, my country and its culture - all the things that had defined me, and given me identity. Like all the fugitive kind, the more successful I was, the longer and further i ran, the less i kept of myself.
- Lin (334)
Now we both know
Sorrows are the seeds of loving
- From the poem in Karla's journal (337)
Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn.
- End of Part Two (346)
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