Short Musings by Hadi Pakzad

Translated from the Persian original.

• Sleep while you're alive; after death, sleep is no pleasure.

• People change; some jerk has already tried his luck.

• As the altitude rises you feel pride; higher still, loneliness.

• From where I am, God is so far away that I miss Him without ever having seen Him.

• The safe embrace for a sad one is the embrace of someone sadder.

• People come in 2 kinds: liars who lie when they need to, and liars who lie whenever they can. The first kind are called honest.

• If you're not rich, love is probably the cheapest entertainment in the world.

• If you don't have the nerve to kill someone, waste their time. Killing time is a crime no one prosecutes.

• These days people are divided into two kinds: those who have the patience and those who don't.

• The complete human has accepted the animal within, and so gets along with the other animals.

• This world, from where they've hung me on the wall, is crooked.

• This extra weight on the shoulders of my being is the share of you, who haven't come yet.

• With you I'm in equilibrium... equilibrium is my being dissolving in your acid.

• Tonight's rain came over there from somewhere near me. Don't be afraid; it's made a bit of a racket to cover its tracks.

• Again you asked about my shifting state. Honestly, I pause a little, and a fresh lie.

• Over the centuries, history's faith never waited for any savior as long as I waited for you in a single night.

• For your maturity I have words and reflection; for your childishness, a smile and patience.

• Don't come back to take back what you left behind; with every leaving you've taken enough.

• To write well you don't need to take anything alone; just skip your pills and go out among people.

• To enter the zoo, buy a ticket; the animals are in cages. To go back to the city, buy a gun.

• I'm certain you'll come; if it gets late, I'll come to believe in the afterlife.

• Once you get used to throwing things away, gradually everything is garbage.

• When you're tortured for no reason, rescue means nothing; you think of rest.

• A bridge between my heart and my face has collapsed; my feelings have no way to reach my face.

• History: The world began with commercials. Little by little, through breeding, people were introduced for advertising. Then people were divided into two kinds: those who were numbers, who were called “persons,” and those who were heroes, who were introduced in the commercials. Then humans arrived at a new meaning, with the definition of patience.

• Endurance means you let the pain come, stay, tear, and go. Endurance is crossing the war zone of pain.

• Single bed or double, sleep is by nature for one; sleep is the most exclusive sanctuary in the world.

• Fear helps you live one more day; courage helps you live one better day.

• Your urge to change the outside world isn't necessarily a sign of your power; it's your inability to run your inside.

• Nausea is the urge to give your experiences back to the world.

• You don't hate me; you hate the feeling you have for me.

• You alone, as much as all the flights of this city, left me for a damp destination.

• You don't live in me, you pass through me; I'm so stirred up by you that connecting to you doesn't calm me, it shatters me.

• Justifications are fashions people dress their words in to keep them up to date.

• Tick-tock, your world runs like clockwork. My world, though, lets out a long whistle, like a kettle that's due to come off the fire.

• Where the biggest concern is having fun, the closer you are, the more of a toy you are.

• Something that costs more to keep than it's worth has no justification for being kept, even if it's a human.

• When you speak, you invite people into the room of your mind; if it isn't a beautiful room, at least clean it.

• The silent angry one is an architect of betrayal.

• In the lab, the mice know each other's names; the lab's owner knows their number.

• In the storm you stirred up, I endure. You break.

• On the road you travel to reach your dreams, you turn into someone new; the new person reaches the old one's dreams.

• Pain changes you so that you yourself become worthy of admiration; alas, you take pride in your pains.

• Pain is something like a miracle. Its use is to make you believe in something.

• A strong enemy defeats you; a patient enemy makes you like himself.

• The world is full of people who understand you perfectly well, and don't do a damn thing else.

• “Shut your mouth” isn't necessarily an insult; it can also be taken as an exercise.

• Be my secret; I'll keep you.

• An ordinary life isn't even worth waking up in the morning for.

• Life is an offer, to someone who doesn't exist yet.

• A woman who is given a lot of attention grows more beautiful every day.

• The simplest reason stupidity succeeds in the world is how easily it gets seen.

• The North Star is the star whose place in the sky is fixed, as if the other stars revolve around it. When I ask her, she has no idea where she is. I love her, she is sad, and I am so paralyzed I can't paint her place for her.

• The hardest thing for a woman is to think that what she has felt is wrong. And for a man, to feel that what he thinks is wrong.

• I can't make sense of my loneliness; no one adds to it and no one takes from it.

• A great effort for a small goal leaves you worn out and sad.

• My silence is an invisible man miming the news of my heart in front of you.

• Collective wisdom never makes a mistake, unless it's a big one.

• A hunter kills and takes; a killer kills and leaves.

• Man's commonplace nature: a natural death, death from old age.

• Don't tell me your beautiful beliefs; tell me their price.

• Most of the pleasures people boast of having experienced are the most primitive adventures of primitive man.

• It's tragic: nature has made a self-tormentor of me, one who gets things wrong with great precision.

• Forgetting isn't an act; it's a process.

• A calm heart doesn't sink from fulfillment to scarcity.

• When you're complete, people want to experience you; when you're alive, they want to live you.

• Perfectionism makes you dissatisfied with yourself, and the worship of perfection with others; perfection won't leave you in peace.

• who is so complete that you yourself don't like yourself beside them.

• A mother has lost her nursing baby; how she suffers, from the inflammation of her full breasts.

• People hear as much of the truth as they can accept, and tell you as much of reality as you can bear.

• In loving someone who loves me, however forbidden it is, I'm afraid of no one. Maybe you own someone's heart and mind, but owning a body is slavery.

• The mice make progress, and are ready for the next experiment.

• You can tame a wild one; it lets you be proud of yourself, but only until the day you cast it out.

• They say I write bitter. Words, the big ones, are often bitter, bigger than the throat; those are the ones I write.

• Software that wants to live better, on hardware that wants to live longer: a human is a war zone.

• You can't be in love with two people at once; if you're infatuated with someone, you don't love yourself enough.

• I'm not saying the Earth isn't God's creation; at least, it isn't His concern.

• You will never conquer the world, because you don't have as much time as it does.

• Art is little, and complete.

• No comeback is so crushing that it can persuade a fool into silence.

• No one walks out suddenly; they leave little by little, and go all at once.

• And beauty is in change.

• When you've been doing something for a long time and don't feel tired, it means tiredness has had time to possess you.

• When your psychiatrist doesn't know the name of your illness, you are suffering from health.

• When there's no one around you and you have hope in no power, you're not alone; you're free.

• A dream can be small, but it must be beautiful. A goal can be ugly, but it must be important. Your goals won't make you happy, and your dreams won't make you successful.

From Hadi Pakzad's Official Telegram Channel

Lines published on Hadi Pakzad's official Telegram channel between June 2016 and August 2024.

• Since the sunlight has no buyers, they sell shutters;
  sunlight, the sun's rubbish, thrown out eight minutes ago,
  is caught behind the window before it reaches the ground;
  and when they grow pale, they store it on their skin.

• If you are a professional loner, you soon realize: loneliness existed before you felt it; it was there before you read about it in a poem! You soon realize that loneliness is not a state of mind, not a definition, not something immaterial; loneliness is simply another person, like you, except that they are no longer within reach.

• Without you, more reluctant than water to be drunk;
  without you, less eager than milk to be milked;
  without you, more ashamed than a tear to be seen on a cheek;
  without you, more slaughtered than leather to be worn.

• Mother shed a tear and slept;
  father sighed and accepted;
  my sister cried and calmed down;
  I choked back my tears and changed.

• Though darkness is a face of which no view is within reach.

• This rain-soaked city struggles to be seen.

• Here thoughts are not produced but recycled! Bins dressed as humans trade mental garbage.

• It's sad: nature has made me a self-tormentor who gets things wrong with precision.

• Winter does not exist in itself; it is the sun that isn't there. Winter is the season when your comforts abandon you.

• Perhaps our country would be a good place to live if we learned that there is a difference between “initiative and vulgarity”, “criticism and revenge”, “coercion and insistence”, “election and appointment”, “mistake and disgrace”, “hero and victim”.

• The rain won't let up; you let go.

• Tell them I'll be of no more use if more time goes by.

• I long for sin, and my heart is at peace;
  who says laughter ends badly?
  I long for sin, and someone is coming,
  and a pure informer watches me, purely;
  I long for fire, and this good sinner
  hauls in wood, for himself and for bad me.

• My heart aches badly,
  not because the king sews lips shut,
  nor even because tongues rot;
  my heart is sad that in this slaughter
  the sleep of thought is so deep.

• You're alone, or you're happy!

• Hey, you who are bound for heaven!
  Maybe heaven isn't a good place, because with what this earth has made of you, you can't go anywhere better!

• Everyone fell prey to death in some order;
  I, in the order of your white teeth.

• If I'm gold, I get melted, made into coins, bent between teeth, passed from hand to hand, turned into greed; buried; I'm cursed.
  You are a gem: cut once, and beautiful forever.

• Every snowflake is proud of itself on its long way down, but we all know it is winter's doing.

• Humans deposit the regret of their short lives in banks; the dinosaurs didn't need banks, they needed death.

• Only you, and only after the rain, know what goes through my bare, wet brain.

• I, who hate memory cells: what am I doing in an age that archives everything?

• You are fearless in disagreeing; sadly, I don't see in you the courage to persuade.

• Our being is a book; tear it to pieces and every word in it is selfishness.

• Take care of me: a word like “always” has one mission, to ruin “everything”.

• Wisdom is a social expression;
  and we look for it in the lines of books?

• If something occupies your excitement, wait for it!
  If it occupies your mind, it is waiting for you to act.

• I am guilty;
  both evidence and understanding have come to torture me: the evidence against me, the understanding within me.

• The chain of my evolution, whose sperm limps,
  neither goes back nor moves forward.

• Beauty is contagious; even fighting it makes you beautiful.

• I stand far off;
  you go;
  once you're far away I'll come back
  and face the decision.

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