Ashfaq Saraf Quotes

#1. No matter how soft you try to grow it, if the soil is full of stones it won't flourish. It would rather grow in ugly patches, here and there, making a mockery of your gardening effort. Better remove the stones first; the spring is not going to last long. Next would be next year; who lives till then?

Ashfaq Saraf

#2. Each day adds a bead
to the ever peevish episodes of frailty,
I try running at an unkempt speed,
returning back like waves into a cruel sea;

Ashfaq Saraf

#3. Memory is the worst lender; It lends not until it borrows. And it borrows not unless it is broke at the previous lending.

Ashfaq Saraf

#4. What hands do I possess?
What sight!
What deliberations do I confess?
What plight!

Ashfaq Saraf

#5. Sleep is a form of nostalgia. It evaluates you for the kind of longings you possess. And for the people in exile, it is the only place where home is not away, where the origin is not detached, where love is reciprocated and memory is not a mere object of refuge.

Ashfaq Saraf

#6. That small freckle postulates a grin on my face:
see to it that midnight reeks insomniac on your eyes;
I turn the pillow upside down to not smell my breath again
Is there, aside from my memory, for you a better place?

Ashfaq Saraf

#7. There hung a certain colour - somewhat akin to colour of despair in sleepless eyes - in the house and as they'd sit for dinner it protruded the relish out of their mouths.

Ashfaq Saraf

#8. There is no harm in not forgetting. Think of a small ship amid storming waters - raging and cruel; who forgets that? Not the man who was rescued. Never the man who rescued consciously. Neither the man whose kin could not be rescued. Nor the man who decided not to rescue.

Ashfaq Saraf

#9. This sentence pinned itself to my memory like moon pinned to the night sky - sometimes whole in sight, sometimes crescent, sometimes behind the clouds, but assuredly there, always there.

Ashfaq Saraf

#10. There must occur a time in every man's life when the idea of a sudden, irrational death does not frighten him. This shall suffice to cure a lot of his persistent miseries.

Ashfaq Saraf

#11. Let's stop by the shades of a tavern--
Selling raspberry handshakes,
Let's recline by the shimmer of a lantern-
Trampling the silence of snowflakes;

Ashfaq Saraf

#12. The saddest of the tales are those which have no words reserved for the protagonist's Mother to speak!

Ashfaq Saraf

#13. Back home Chinars sniff autumn breeze,
and green leaves blush to crimson frangibility;
Yet it is me here drinking coffee, thinking airplanes;

Ashfaq Saraf

#14. My mother sang me a lullaby,
my mother had not slept for a while,
her hands the same: craggy and agile.
the wooden ceiling emanated the same tie:
sulky fumes of disdain.
We were never given to forgetfulness,
We were occupied.

Ashfaq Saraf

#15. In the sense of attributing to the claimant a prognostic view of his present ailments, freedom has always been of the oppressed.

Ashfaq Saraf