Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too.
We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gna...
Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.
To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no real genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being...
The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.
Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough p...
One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his lef...
In spite of all my efforts to create a neat, tidy, obedient, moderate, unexceptional persona, I was simplytoo weird for them; until that is, my first female tutor was hired.
He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the fa...
Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there?...And the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble'.
A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers...
To live in Metropolis was to know that the exceptional was as commonplace as diet soda, that abnormality was the popcorn norm.
They feared her [the dream beloved], knowing that, being impossible, she was irresistable, and that was why the king loved her best.
These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.