Nourhan > Nourhan's Quotes

“Pylades: I’ll take care of you.
Orestes: It’s rotten work.
Pylades: Not to me. Not if it’s you.”
― Anne Carson, Euripides

“In my dream I apologize to everyone I meet. Instead of introducing myself, I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. In real life, oddly enough, when I am fully awake and out and about, if I catch someone’s eye, I quickly look away. Perhaps this too is a form of apology. Perhaps this is the form apologies take in real life. In real life the looking away is the apology, despite the fact that when I look away I almost always feel guilty; I do not feel as if I have apologized. Instead I feel as if I have created a reason to apologize, I feel the guilt of having ignored that thing—the encounter. I could have nodded, I could have smiled without showing my teeth. In some small way I could have wordlessly said, I see you seeing me and I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. Afterwards, after I have looked away, I never feel as if I can say, Look, look at me again so that I can see you, so that I can acknowledge that I have seen you, so that I can see you and apologize.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“I’m stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it but then put it back down not because I am not ready but because they were not ready for my type of fruity flesh. I felt so ripe and sweet—what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people’s mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“The fact that no one knows where I am is my only happiness. If only I could prolong this forever! It would be far more just than death. I am empty and futile in every corner of my being, even in my unhappiness.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“I mustn't look at you too much, or I won't be able to take my eyes off you at all.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“There are times when my longing for you overwhelms me […] so often I can think of you only with teeth clenched.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“I am so miserable, there are so many questions, I can see no way out and am so wretched and feeble that I could lie forever on the sofa and keep opening and closing my eyes without knowing the difference.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“When dealing with myself I am powerless.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
― John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife

“Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.”
― John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife

“You're in love?
Out
Out of love?
I love someone. She doesn't love me.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“The brief relief of seeing other people when I leave my room turns into a desperate need to be alone, and then being alone turns into a terrible fear that I will have no friends, I will be alone in this world and in my life. I will eventually be so crazy from this black wave, which seems to be taking over my head with increasing frequency, that one day I will just kill myself, not for any great, thoughtful existential reasons, but because I need immediate relief.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“I didn’t know what to call it, what was happening between us, but I liked it. It felt silly and fragile and good.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
                    but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                                        but then he’s still left with his hands.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad. It’s too much work.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“the centre of every poem is this:
The centre of every poem is this:
I have loved you. I have had to deal with that.

— Salma Deera, Letters from Medea (2015)”
― Salma Deera, Letters From Medea

“It’s not at all what I thought it would be. Nothing is. No matter how much I love it, it doesn’t love me back. If I weren’t so broken, it would fit. I feel like I don’t have a home.”
― Mary H.K. Choi, Yolk

“and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”
― Milan Kundera

“و المرء لا تشقيه إلاّ نفسه حاشى الحياة بأنّها تشقيه
ما أجهل الإنسان يضني بعضه بعضا و يشكو كلّ ما يضنيه
و يظنّ أن عدوّه في غيره و عدوّه يمسي و يضحي فيه”
― عبدالله البردوني

“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena