“Shahid was the free spirit of the Kamal family: a dreamer, an idealist, a wanderer on the face of the earth--or, as Ahmed would put it, a lazy fuckwit.”

“Even free spirits had to the face the music sometime.”

“I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.”

“Wandering, ever wandering, Because life holds not anything so good As to be free of yesterday, and bound Towards a new to-morrow ; and they wend Into a world of unknown faces, where It may be there are faces waiting them, Faces of friendly strangers, not the long Intolerable monotony of friends. The joy of earth is yours, O wanderers, The only joy of the old earth, to wake, As each new dawn is patiently renewed, With foreheads fresh against a fresh young sky. To be a little further on the road, A little nearer somewhere, some few steps Advanced into the future, and removed By some few counted milestones from the past; God gives you this good gift, the only gift That God, being repentant, has to give. Wanderers, you have the sunrise and the stars; And we, beneath our comfortable roofs, Lamplight, and daily fire upon the hearth, And four walls of a prison, and sure food. But God has given you freedom, wanderers.”

“In that nanosecond of enlightenment I knew that the human spirit survives the death of the physical body and I understood that my wandering soul needed to get back into its earthly habitat.”

“Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits.”