Quote by Ismat Chughtai: “A heart is not a stone. It must have wounds to prove it is alive.”

Feeling pain is not a weakness — it is proof that you are genuinely engaged with life and with other people. A person who has never been hurt or scarred emotionally is one who has never really loved or risked anything. Wounds are the evidence of a life fully lived.

Chughtai wrote during World War Two and the final years of British India, a period in which traditional social structures were under strain. Her fiction challenged the polite silences around women's desires and suffering, making her simultaneously celebrated and prosecuted in colonial courts.

Pioneering Urdu fiction writer from Badaun, India, born in 1915, known for her unflinching portrayals of women's inner lives, sexuality, and class. Her 1942 short story 'Lihaaf' led to an obscenity trial, cementing her reputation as one of Urdu literature's most fearless voices.