Etel Adnan > Quotes

“Morning. Vast. Imprecision. Fog has covered everything in gray
absolute. This has lasted. Doubt looms over the mind. Absence
is harder to accept than death.”
― Etel Adnan, Sea & Fog

“Memory and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks and constantly merging. Both escape our will, though we depend on them. Measured but measured by whom or by what? The one is inside, the other, outside or so it seems, but is that true? Time seems also buried deep in us but where? Memory is right here, in the head, but it can exit, abandon that head, leave it behind, disappear. Memory, a sanctuary of infinite patience.”
― Etel Adnan, Night

“There are moments when
the past ceases to be a form
of the present.
Rain and tears
look alike.”
― Etel Adnan, Time

“Love in all its forms is the most important matter that we will ever face, but also the most dangerous, the most unpredictable, the most maddening. But it is also the only salvation I know of”
― Etel Adnan, The Cost for Love We are Not Willing to Pay

“In the green escape of my palace, over a bridge, under a canopy of opalescent light, through there, between dark branches and their shivering leaves, I'm lost in the scent of yellow roses, arrested by the range's filtering light.”
― Etel Adnan, There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other

“Dear soul,
am I only because I have been?”
― Etel Adnan, Night

“لو كانت باريس سماً قاتلاً لشربت منه جرعة كبير بكل سرور ولأنهيت حياتي”
― Etel Adnan, Paris, When It's Naked

“يوجد العيد دائما حيث الشقاء مقيم”
― Etel Adnan, Paris, When It's Naked

“Morality is violence. An invisible violence at first. Love is a supreme violence, hidden deep in the darkness of our atoms. When a stream flows into a river, it’s love and it’s violence. When a cloud loses itself in the sky, it’s a marriage. When the roots of a tree split open a rock it’s the movement of life. When the sea rises and falls back only to rise again it’s the process of History. When a man and a woman find each other in the silence of the night, it’s the beginning of the end of the tribe’s power, and death itself becomes a challenge to the ascendancy of the group.”
― Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose

“Spring is dangerous, like love. And love survives the lovers.”
― Etel Adnan, Seasons

“The day is not made of light, but of will”
― Etel Adnan, Time

“Eternity is non evident. There’s this endless rotation of the
sun in the skull, the stillness outside, and a storm within.
At least a river is always flowing in some part of the country.
Winds, always gathering speed, shatter the order of things.
We return home, in tears.”
― Etel Adnan, Night

“نحن البحر. نجزر ونفيض بلا انتظام”
― Etel Adnan, Paris, When It's Naked

“It is a sentiment of tremendous truth and simplicity, yet tremendously difficult for the mind to metabolize — we remain material creatures, spiritually sundered by the fact of our borrowed atoms, which we will each return to the universe, to the stardust that made us, despite our best earthly efforts.”
― Etel Adnan

“قلبي يضيق بالخوف من الآتي”
― Etel Adnan, Paris, When It's Naked

“Silence is the creation of space, a space that memory needs to use . . . an incubator. We're dealing here with dimensions, stretching our inner muscles, pushing aside any interference. We're dealing with numbers, but not counting. Silence demands the nature of night, even in full day, it demands shadows.”
― Etel Adnan, Shifting the Silence

“Writing is drawing, drawing is writing. Because it's the same gesture. They're close already.”
― Etel Adnan

“هل الغرض من النافذة أن تبقيك في الداخل، أو تفتح مداركك نحو الخارج؟”
― Etel Adnan, Paris, When It's Naked

“هل للذاكرة قوانينها الخاصة فيها؟”
― Etel Adnan, Paris, When It's Naked

“لن نكون أبداً كما كنّا”
― Etel Adnan, Paris, When It's Naked

“نشعر بالنشوة في أكثر المدن رداءة”
― Etel Adnan, Paris, When It's Naked

“desire intensifies on the silver edge of the sea. my friends, don’t wait for me any longer, my heart is in the abundance of the same spring as yours”
― Etel Adnan, Time

“احذر الكلمات. لأنه من السهل أن تغير معناها وتخلق سوء تفاهم معذباً”
― Etel Adnan, Paris, When It's Naked

“Their women only exert indirect powers over them, powers that seem ineffective, or else are so strong that they, the men, can’t recognize them as such. But a woman who stands up to them and looks them in the eye is a tree to be cut down, and they cut it down. She falls with the sound of dead wood which disappears among the perfidious murmurings of the city, and to the smirking of other women who are satisfied with the male victories.”
― Etel Adnan

“they tell me there are four seasons
but I live in a fifth one
which is your space
and your time”
― Etel Adnan

“philosophy is a non-knowledge: thought takes pleasure in measuring its borders”
― Etel Adnan, Time

“قد يكون قول الحقيقة أحياناً أذكى صيغة لإيصال المعلومات المغلوط فيها”
― Etel Adnan, Paris, When It's Naked

“laziness-with it's inebriating effects-
is the wine of the poor, and of those
who wander among them”
― Etel Adnan, Time

“Beauty, it's an inner sense, and it makes us happy. It's not complicated, we need it.”
― Etel Adnan

“Terror is our collective failure. Life is nature's triumph.”
― Etel Adnan