Afina > Afina's Quotes

“Who are you if you lose your favorite person? Can you lose your favorite person without losing yourself? I reach for Stargirl and she's gone. I'm not me anymore.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“if you learn to hate one or two persons... you'll soon hate millions of people.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”
I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“You cannot count on the physical proximity of someone you love, all the time. A seed that sprouts at the foot of its parent tree remains stunted until it is transplanted. Rama will be in my care, and he will be quite well. But ultimately, he will leave me too. Every human being, when the time comes, has to depart to seek his fulfillment in his own way.”
― Valmiki, The Ramayana

“Misfortune is the best fortune.
Rejection by all is victory.”
― Vālmīki

“And, having killed him (Abhimanyu), your people danced round his dead body like savage hunters exulting over their prey. All good men in the army were grieved and tears rolled from their eyes. Even the birds of prey, that circled overhead making noises seemed to cry 'Not thus! Not thus!”
― C. Rajagopalachari, Mahabharata

“I throw my makeshift jai-namaz, my prayer rug, on the floor and I get on my knees, lower my forehead to the ground, my tears soaking through the sheet. I bow to the west. Then I remember I haven’t prayed for over fifteen years. I have long forgotten the words. But it doesn’t matter, I will utter those few words I still remember: La illaha ila Allah, Muhammad u rasul ullah. There’s no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger. I see now that Baba was wrong, there’s a God, there always had been. I see Him here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him, not the white masjid with its bright diamond lights, and towering minarets. There’s a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that He forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my hour of need, I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is. [...] I hear a whimpering and realize it is mine, my lips are salty with the tears trickling down my face. I feel the eyes of everyone in this corridor on me and still I bow to the west. I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I'd always feared they would.”
― Khaled Hosseini , The Kite Runner

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime...”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“She said, 'I'm so afraid.' And I said, 'why?,' and she said, 'Because I'm so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.' I asked her why and she said, 'They only let you be this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Life is a train, get on board.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“I think that everything he did, feeding the poor, giving money to friends in need, it was all a way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“In his rearview mirror, I saw something flash in his eyes. "You want to know?" he sneered. "Let me imagine, Agha sahib. You probably lived in a big two- or three-story house with a nice backyard that your gardener filled with flowers and fruit trees. All gated, of course. Your father drove an American car. You had servants, probably Hazaras. Your parents hired workers to decorate the house for the fancy mehmanis they threw, so their friends would come over to drink and boast about their travels to Europe or America. And I would bet my first son's eyes that this is the first time you've ever worn a pakol." He grinned at me, revealing a mouthful of prematurely rotting teeth. "Am I close?"
Why are you saying these things?" I said.
Because you wanted to know," he spat. He pointed to an old man dressed in ragged clothes trudging down a dirt path, a large burlap pack filled with scrub grass tied to his back. "That's the real Afghanistan, Agha sahib. That's the Afghanistan I know. You? You've always been a tourist here, you just didn't know it.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Zindagi migzara (life goes on)”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“Everybody has to die, Firdaus. I will die, and you will die. The important thing is how to live until you die.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“Ibu mana pun, yang baik atau buruk, tetap terluka ketika anaknya dicela. Meski celaan itu tidak salah, dan juga bukan fitnah. Tetapi tali pusar anak dari ibunya hanya diputus oleh sebilah gunting dunia. Di antara mereka berdua ada pertalian abadi, yang bahkan oleh seorang ayah pun tak bisa dipahami”
― Leila S. Chudori, Pulang

“Where we live in the world
is never one place. Our hearts,
those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us
moons before we are ready for them.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East – A Collection About Arab-American Family Life in Jerusalem and the West Bank

“Making a Fist

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern
past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

“Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye

“I never did understand
why the tree was still happy
at the end. The little boy
used her until she was
nothing but a stump.
She couldn't even run away.
But the ending was always the same:
"And the tree was happy.”
― Allison Rivers, Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25

“I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that -- if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye

“Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, There Is No Long Distance Now

“Apparently people commonly died when their loved ones were out of the room. Bathroom break. Quick trip down to the cafeteria for a grilled cheese. It was easier to die if you didn't have family members to worry about at that exact moment.

Easier for the one who was dying, maybe.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, There Is No Long Distance Now