when Nasir Kazmi said “tere qarib reh ke bhi dil mutmain na tha/ guzri hai mujh pe ye bhi qayamat kabhi kabhi” and when Ahmad Faraz wrote “faraz aise bhi lamhe kabhi kabhi aae/ ke dil-girafta rahe dilruba ke hote hue”
cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
“Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard.” - Brennan Lee Mulligan
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
“Night long on the jade staircase, white dew appears, soaks through gauze stockings. She lets down crystalline blinds, gazes out through jewel lacework at the autumn moon.”
— Lament of the Jade Stairs Li Bai [Tang Dynasty] Translation by David Hinton, from Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology (source)
