Bilal Tanweer

“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.”

“people who ran away are friends!”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”