Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things--as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty--but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge

The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion.

So the stories aren't just stories, is what you're saying. They're really secret knowledge disguised as stories.""One could say that of all stories, younger brother.

Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states and without contradiction

What naive garbage. People don't want freedom anymore--even those to whom freedom is a kind of religion are afraid of it, like trembling acolytes who make sacrifices to some pagan god. People want their governments to keep secrets from them. They want the hand of law to be brutal. They are so terrified by their own power that they will vote to have it taken out of their hands. Look at America. Look at the sharia states. Freedom is a dead philosophy, Alif. The world is returning to its natural state, to the rule of the weak by the strong. Young as you are, it's you who are out of touch, not me.

The few Americans he had encountered in his lifetime had all seemed flat to him, as if freedom weakened one's capacity for intense emotion by demanding too little of it.

How dense and literal it is. I thought it had a much more sophisticated brain." "Your mother is dense," Alif said wearily. "My mother was an errant crest of sea foam. But that is neither here nor there.

The only power worth a snot is the power to get up after you fall down.

It's not the size of the girl in the fight that counts... it's the size of the fight in the girl! -MISS MARVEL

Nobody as the right to give up on a whole generation before it's even had a right to prove itself.

I suppose every innovation started out as a fantasy.

You have such an odd relationship to your environment," mused the man. "Such a paranoid relationship. You seem intent on existing in smaller and smaller spaces, filled with more and more gadgets, with the mistaken impression that this will give you more control over your lives. There's something a little impious about it.""Nothing wrong with gadgets," muttered Alif."No, except that they're not magic," said the man, "and a lot of you seem to believe they should be.

Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.""How terrible," said Farukhuaz."Do you think so? I find it reassuring. It saves me from having to divine meaning in every sorrow that comes my way.

You always have a choice. You can't stop what's coming, but you can decide how you meet it. The fate of the world is out of your hands. It always was. But your fate--what you decide to do right now-- is still up to you.

All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something

Good is not a thing you are. It is a thing you do.

Love the life you have been given. And be humbled by it. It is not to be despised.

Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.

Be careful with this one" said Dina, bending down to greet the cat. "All cats are half jinn, but I think she's three quarters.

He's holding my hand! A boy is holding my hand! This is happening! I should let go. I should blush and act shy. Like a girl from the movies. But that's not what I do. I hold on.