Life & Wisdom Quote by Humayun Ahmed

“Life is an illusion” lands like a philosophical mic drop, but Humayun Ahmed’s genius is that he rarely uses big ideas to show off. He uses them to smuggle emotional truth into everyday language. Calling life an illusion doesn’t mean nothing matters; it means the “solid” world people cling to - status, certainty, even heartbreak as destiny - is partly a story we keep agreeing to tell ourselves. Ahmed spent his career watching how ordinary Bangladeshi lives are shaped by narratives: family duty, social respectability, political turbulence, and the private fantasies people build just to stay afloat. The line punctures those inherited scripts.

The second half, “we must create our own reality,” flips what could be nihilism into a kind of stern compassion. “Must” is doing heavy lifting: agency isn’t a self-help luxury here, it’s a survival skill. In a society where institutions and traditions can feel immovable, “creating reality” reads as an insistence on inner authorship - choosing meaning when the external world is unreliable, or when history keeps interrupting personal plans. It’s also a writerly credo: reality is constructed, so construction is power.

Subtext: Ahmed is warning against passive living. If you don’t author your life, someone else will - a family, a government, a lover, a fear. The illusion isn’t that life is fake; it’s that there’s a single, prewritten version you’re obligated to accept.