Umair Naeem

“Worry looks back, Hope looks forward, but Faith always looks up.”

“This was the Karachi now – barbed wires protecting consulates, the pretentious covering themselves with faces of those who were hiding behind those barbed wires. This was Karachi – gaudy and luxurious, with a façade of glamor, ignoring the truth underneath. But Sophie was no cynic, and still loved the city she had returned to. ‘You can’t hate what’s yours,’ she smiled to herself.”

“People live to love; but then they realize that love is nothing. Love is just desire and longing; the culmination of a moment where everything falls into place. The moment passes. Things fall out of place.”

“But it was fantasy, and she knew it. It was her fantasy, and the fantasy of everyone else who would look at her and at her pictures; and it would stop being real the moment the man with the camera stopped clicking.”

“Even in the darkness of the closed box she felt trapped inside, she could see light shining in through tiny holes on the lid.They were like the stars beckoning her towards a place where all would be simple . . . away from the shadows, away from the darkness.”

“Time is immaterial. It is immortal.Time never chose people to define their lives with it. That was humanity’s choice. That was when man gave Time the control of everything, and ceased to control it himself. Time never tires, but it ensures that it tires man. That’s how it controls humanity.It creates hopelessness for man.”

“It all fell away then – the control, the independence . . . everything. She had known it would never be easy to findsolitude . . . to find herself. Not in this city, where appearances were everything; where emptiness filled luxurious landscapes till there was nothing but hollow splendor…She hated the pretense.More than hatred, she was frightened of it.”

“I really love this city. It’s so very beautiful. It’s so multidimensional.People say it has a darkness and a decadence, which it tries to hide; they say it’s full of the pretentious and opulent trying to strangle the dark reality. But that’s true for most of the other great cities too. . . .There is a soul here . . . and that soul is as pure as the heat of the sun that shines down on it and the rain that falls to purify it.”

“Some want to be owned, and some want to be saved. Only some want to exist in the glow of contentment.”

“Needs can never be replaced; wants get replaced.”