Once through this ruined city did I pass I espied a lonely…

“I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases.…

— Khushwant Singh

I have no words alas! to tell the loveliness of loving well

— Edgar Allan Poe

Nothing more makes me cry more than knowing all I did was try. But all you said was goodbye and then left me to…

— Andrew Duran

“But I have eyes only for the lonely bird of prey that stands at the center of all the silly, vain, power-hungry little pigeons.…

— Pierce Brown

“Behind us lay Atlanta,” Sherman recalled in his memoirs as the army began to march, “smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high…

— Anonymous

“I have become a gate To the ruined city, dry, / Indestructible by fire.”

— Howard Nemerov

“I spur my horse past the ruined city; the ruined city, that wakes the traveler's thoughts: ancient battlements, high and low; old grave mounds,…

— Han-shan

“So that was it?” she demanded. “All that build-up to rescue a princess, and . . . that was it?” “Would you prefer trying…

— Terry Mancour

I speak Urdu quite a lot, too, and I read a lot of Persian.

— Juan Cole

“She tries to maintain a nondescript exterior; she learns the sideways glance instead of looking at people directly. She speaks in practised, precise sentences…

— Mohammed Hanif

When I write a poem, I do not have to worry about using a higher Urdu vocabulary because I know the reader knows Urdu…

— Gulzar

I write in Urdu and everything is written by my hand.

— Gulzar

Being master of Urdu doesn't interest me, being part of the global society does, breathing hope into that society matters to me.

— Gulzar

“Insaano ky, insaano ky saath baahemi tamaam jazbon ko jab Allah ny Roz-e-Awwal takhleeq kia to muhabbat hi woh waahid jazba tha jis ki…

— Farhat Ishtiaq

My mother tongue is Punjabi, but my first language is Urdu, which was the case with the people in undivided Punjab.

— Gulzar