Saadat Hasan Manto Quotes

 30 Saadat Hasan Manto Quotes

Saadat Hasan Manto was the famous Pakistani writer, playwright and author. As an author, he authorized many books and here are some of the names of his famous books: Why I Write, Toba Tek Singh, Thanda Gosht, Selected Stories, Stars from another sky, and Black Milk: A Collection of Short Stories etc. So read the best Saadat Hasan Manto which are in the following.

1. “War has brought inflation even to the graveyard.” 

2. “If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty. With my stories, I only expose the truth.”

3. “…and it is also possible, that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive.” 

4. “Writers rarely set out to be national writers. They need small, intimate worlds, full of details; the macro scale of countries, especially those as wide and various as India, cannot be their direct material.” 

5. “Literature and film in my opinion are like saloons where bottles have no labels. I want to taste each one myself and figure out which is what. If I’m denied this by labelling, then my entertainment is considerably lessened.”

6. “If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked. I don’t even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that’s the job of dressmakers.”

7. “The field that cannot feed even its tiller Burn down every stalk that stands on it.” 

8. “I feel like I am always the one tearing everything up and forever sewing it back together.” 

9. “I wondered why people consider escapism so bad, even the escapism on display right then. At first it might appear unseemly, but in the end its lack of pretension gives it its own sort of beauty.”

10. “For me, remembrance of things past has always been a waste of time, and what’s the point of tears? I don’t know. I’ve always been focussed on today. Yesterday and tomorrow hold no interest for me. What had to happen, did, and what will happen, will.”

11. “To tell you the truth, the world seemed full of sad people – those who slept on the uncovered stoops of shops as well as those who lived in high-rise mansions. The man who walks about on foot worries that he doesn’t have decent shoes to wear. The man who rides the automobile frets that he doesn’t have the latest model car. Every man’s complaint is valid in its own way. Every man’s wish is legitimate in its own right.”

12. “If a man has to make a woman the center of his love, why should he integrate animality into this sacred human emotion?… Is love incomplete without it?… Is love the name of physical exercise?”

13. “Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still a slave in both these countries — the slave of prejudice … slave of religious fanaticism … slave of barbarity and inhumanity.”

14. “A man remains a man no matter how poor his conduct. A woman, even if she were to deviate for one instance, from the role given to her by men, is branded a whore. She is viewed with lust and contempt. Society closes on her doors it leaves ajar for a man stained by the same ink. If both are equal, why are our barbs reserved for the woman?”

15. “Nobody knows my city’s respectable better than my city’s prostitutes.”

16. “You would have realized that it wasn’t Mumtaz, a muslim, a friend of yours, but a human being you had killed. I mean, if he was a bastard, by killing him you wouldn’t have killed the bastard in him; similarly, assuming that he was a Muslim, you wouldn’t have killed his Muslimness, but him.”

17. “He catches the thieves that lie in the hearts of their pure and respectable wives. And he compares them to the purity in the heart of a whore in a brothel.” 

18. “He ate off dirty plates and was unfazed. His pillowcase was soiled and stank, but he never thought of changing it. Hamid thought long and hard, but he couldn’t understand him. He often asked, ‘Babuji, why aren’t you revolted by dirtiness?”

19. “Thought a glass of lassi would be refreshing. In the shop I noticed that the fan was on, but turned away from both customers and the owner. I was curious and asked why it was so. The owner glared at me and said: ‘Can’t you see?’ I looked. The fan was pointed in the direction of a poster of our great leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. I shouted, ‘Pakistan Zindabad!’ and left without the lassi. In front of a shop, a man”

20. “His last years were beset with financial troubles; he drank heavily; he wrote to Chughtai on more than one occasion, pleading with her to find a way for him to come back to India. She was surprised to learn that far from large protests and signed declarations on his behalf, many in Pakistan felt he deserved to be punished. He died on January 18, 1955 in Lahore at the age of forty two.” 

21. “To those men who say that women from “good families” must come into the world of cinema, I have this question: What is it that you mean by “good?” A woman, who honestly puts her wares on display, and sells them without an intention to cheat, is such a woman not virtuous?”

22. “Allah sends down natural disasters to control population explosion. He encourages us to go to war, He creates Pakistan and Akhand Bharat. In doing this, He teaches humans new and innovative methods of birth control.”

23. “Manto’s take on Ismat:
“Ismat’s pen and tongue both run fast. When she starts writing, her ideas race ahead and the words cannot catch up with them. When she speaks, her words seem to tumble over one another. If sheenters the kitchen to show her culinary skill, everything will be in a mess. Being hasty by nature, she would conjure up the cooked roti in her mind even before she had finished kneading the dough. The potatoes would note yet be peeled although she would have already finished making the curry in her imagination. I feel sometimes she may just go into the kitchen andcome out again afer being satiated by her imagination.”

24. “Here in Manto’s own words that he wanted to mark his grave with: “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing….
Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He.” 

25. “We’ve been hearing this for some time now — Save India from this, save it from that. The fact is that India needs to be saved from the people who say it should be saved.”

26. “That ugly truth about Manto, the man: that for all his love of Indian multiplicity, he went to Pakistan. He even tried convincing Chughtai to go. ‘The future looks beautiful in Pakistan,’ he said to her, ‘We’ll be able to get the houses of people who’ve fled from there. It’ll be just us there. We’ll progress very quickly.’ When I read this, I had trouble holding the two Mantos in my mind. It seemed impossible that the creator of Manto, the narrator and fictional presence, so immersed in the variety of India, seeming so much to rejoice in it, should also be the author of that remark, with its sly wish for homogeneity, for the place where ‘It’ll be just us.’ Chughtai, for other reasons, was also disgusted.” 

27. “Dear God, master of the universe, compassionate and merciful: we who are steeped in sin, kneel in supplication before your throne and beseech you to recall from this world Saadat Hasan Manto, son of Ghulam Hasan Manto, who was a man of great piety. Take him away, Lord, for he runs away from fragrance and chases after filth. He hates the bright sun, preferring dark labyrinths. He has nothing but contempt for modesty but is fascinated by the naked and the shameless. He hates sweetness but will give his life to taste bitter fruit. He will not so much as look at housewives but is in seventh heaven in the company of whores. He will not go near running waters but loves to wade through filth. Where others weep, he laughs; and where others laugh, he weeps. Faces blackened by evil, he loves to wash with tender care to make visible their real features. He never thinks about you but follows Satan everywhere, the same fallen angel who once disobeyed you.”

28. “As a writer, I find the relationship fascinating. Consider it. There is tension, and often unpleasantness, in both the union of man and woman and of State and citizen. There is a great deal of hypocrisy too, but the relationship is not ever severed. The intercourse between State and citizens (it will be appropriate to call it forcible intercourse) also produces offspring as a marriage does. But frightening ones, like the “Safety Act and Ordinance”. Offspring that resemble their father, the State, more than the citizenry.”

29. “I thought that the Hindus and Muslims would busy themselves in this war and their blood, which did not mix in mosque and temple, would finally mingle in Bombay’s drains and gutters. I” 

30. “A little ahead was a shop burnt in the riots. A man now sat inside with two large slabs of ice on the floor. A thought came to me: ‘At last the poor shop has the chance to cool itself.”