The collection / 13 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

What appears strange and complex becomes stranger and more complicated once you begin to investigate it. That's the true nature of the world.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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02Undated

Now, standing here, it is clear as day: more than anything else, you want to find words for what you feel and think and everything that is dark. And then this terrifying thought hits you: Yes, your father wrote poetry to find a language for his wounds. Yes, you in your own way have become your father.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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03Undated

These stories, I realized, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city but as a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city. That's how we lose the city - that's how our knowledge of what the world is is taken away from us - when what we know is blasted into rubble and what is created in its place bears no resemblance to what there was and we are left strangers in a place we knew, in a place we ought to have known.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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04Undated

Living in this city, you developed a certain relationship with violence and news of violence: you expected it, dreaded it, and then when it happened, you worked hard to look away from it, because there was nothing you could do about it - not even grieve, because you knew that it would happen again and maybe in a way that was worse than before. Grieving is possible only when you know you have come to an end, when there is nothing more to follow. This city was full of bottled-up grief.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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05Undated

people who ran away are friends!

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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06Undated

Reasons were invented, and stories were reasons that allowed us to connect ourselves to the world, to compose ourselves in ways that others could read. Fragments were true but we needed stories greater than fragments. We needed stories in order to imagine the mad world we lived in.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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07Undated

Once you tell somebody a story, you are all in the same world and you can all speak to each other about the same things and understand the same things.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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08Undated

You just gave her an angry glance in return. It was the kind of glance that children give their parents when they know exactly the kind of total power they have over them and when the temptation to shatter them with one word, one phrase is overwhelming, but something – just the vague knowledge perhaps that the mess they create would be too great to gather – holds them back.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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09Undated

for the first time I am confronted with the fact that places and people are like things: both made of memories and meaningful to us in the same way: we construct ourselves in our conversations with them.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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10Undated

a city is all about how you look at it

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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11Undated

My dear, you are not one person. You have many people in you, and each one can ask only some kinds of questions.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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12Undated

We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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13Undated

You see, my son, a city is all about how you look at it...We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.

Bilal Tanweer / quote

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