Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“It's difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn't enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I can stand in the woods and see the world spark.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else.”
― Ayn Rand

“The brain of a person in love will show activity in the amygdala, which is associated with gut feelings, and in the nucleus accumbens, an area associated with rewarding stimuli that tends to be active in drug abusers. Or, to recap: the brain of a person in love doesn't look like the brain of someone overcome by deep emotion. It looks like the brain of a person who's been snorting coke.”
― Jodi Picoult, House Rules

“From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“لا تصالح علي الدم .. حتي بدم!
لا تصالح! و لو قيل رأس برأس
أكل الرؤوس سواء؟
أقلب الغريب كقلب أخيك؟!
أعيناه عينا أخيك؟
و هل تساوي يد ... سيفها كان لك
بيد سيفها أثكلك؟”
― أمل دنقل, الأعمال الكاملة

“لا تسألْني إن كانَ القُرآنْ
.مخلوقاً..أو أزَليّ
بل سَلْني إن كان السُّلطانْ
!!لِصّاً.. أو نصفَ نبيّ”
― أمل دنقل, الأعمال الكاملة

“قلبي حرّان، حرّان
والعينان الخضراوان
مروحتان!”
― أمل دنقل, الأعمال الكاملة

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.”
― Ayn Rand

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.”
― Ayn Rand

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“فعلا، أنا أكثر أنانية- وربما أذكى قليلا- من الذين أدخل معهم في علاقات: شخص مهووس بنفسي وعندي قابلية على الضجر تجعلني أتصرف بطريقة تغيظ، وربما من المستحيل أن يكون الشخص الذي معي سعيدا...

عندي قابلية على العزلة واحتقارا دفنا للناس، بالذات في أمورهم الإجتماعية....

إني أريد أن أكون كما أنا طوال الوقت بغض النظر عن السياق، ولأني لست مستعدا للتنازل أو التواؤم دائما ما أعاني النتائج...”
― يوسف رخا, كتاب الطغرى: غرائب التاريخ في مدينة المريخ

“Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“أصابك عشق أم رميت بأسهم - فما هذه إلا سجيّة مغرمِ
ألا فاسقني كاسات خمر وغني لي - بذكري سليمى والكمان ونغمي
فدع عنك ذكر العامرية إنني ـ أغار عليها من فمي المتكلمِ
أغار عليها من أبيها وأمها ـ إذا حدثاها بالكلام المغمغمِ
أغار عليها من ثيابها ـ إذا لبستها فوق جسم منعّم
فواللّه لولا اللّه فواللّه ـ لولا اللّه والخوف والحياء
لقبلتها، للثمتها، لعضتها - لضممتها بين العقيق وزمزم
وان حرم الله في شرعه الزنا - فما حرّم التقبيلُ يوماً على الفم
وإن حرمت يوما على دين محمدٍ - فخذها على دين المسيح ابن مريم

أَعُدُّ اللَيالي لَيلَةً بَعدَ لَيلَةٍ - وَقَد عِشتُ دَهراً لا أَعُدُّ اللَيالِيا
أُصلّي فما أدري إذا ما ذكرتُها - أثنتّينِ صلّيتُ العشاء أَم ثمانيا

عشقتك يا ليلى وأنت صغيرة - وأنا ابن سبع ما بلغت الثمانيا
يقولون ليلى في العراق مريضة - ألا ليتني كنت الطبيب المداويا
و قالوا عنك سوداء حبشية - ولولا سواد المسك ما انباع غاليا

بلغوها إذا أتيتم حماها - أنني مت في الغرام فداها
واذكروني لها بكل جميل - فعساها تحن علي عساها
واصحبوها لتربتي فعظامي - تشتهي أن تدوسها قدماها
إن روحى من الضريح تناجيها - وعيني تسير إثر خطاها
لم يشقني يوم القيامة لولا - أملي أنني هناك أراها

تسائلني حلوة المبسم - متى أنت فبّلتني في فمي؟
سلي شفتيك بما حسّتاه - من شفتي شاعر مغرم
ألم تغمضي عندها ناظريك؟ - وبالرّاحتين ألم تحتمي؟
فإن شئت أرجعتها ثانيا - مضاعفة للفم المنعم
فقالت و غضذت بأهدابها - إذا كان حقا فلا تحجم
سأغمض عينيّ كي لا أراك - وما في صنيعك من مأثم
كأنّك في الحلم قبّلتني - فقلت و أفديك أن تحلمي”
― تراث

“I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge--he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil--he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor--he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire--he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy--all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is desired to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was--that robot of the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love--he was not man.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“She doesn't understand the concept of Roman numerals. She thought we just fought in world war eleven.”
― Joan Rivers

“I thought you were gone forever, I thought you’d walked away from everything, because I failed, because I destroyed the only thing that ever mattered to me. I waited for you to come, but you didn’t.”
― Alexandra Adornetto, Halo

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
― Alan Watts

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“It gives me strength to have somebody to fight for; I can never fight for myself, but, for others, I can kill.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy. ”
― Aleister Crowley, Moonchild