Menna Yasser > Menna's Quotes

“Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in street look not just indeferent but ugly...perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant" the breathing method”
― Stephen King, The Body

“Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air;
And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;
And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.”
― Henry Van Dyke

“I felt a pang -- a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before.
It was homesickness.
Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“Why hadn’t he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided reality
by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectation
divided by reality-you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.
Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to create
optimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, a
fraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zero
without reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at any
provocation.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“You stared at the stranger in front of you and decided,
categorically, that this was no longer your son. Or you made the decision to find whatever scraps of
your child you still could in what he had become.
Was that even really a choice, if you were a mother?”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“He wished he knew what to say to make her feel better, but the truth was, he
didn’t feel all that great himself and he didn’t know if there were even any words in the English
language to take away this kind of stunning shock, this understanding that the world isn’t the place
you thought it was.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“Invisibility, actually, was something he was pretty good at. He'd perfected it over the past twelve years.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“She was all the things I wasn't. And i was all the things she wasn't. she could paint circles around anyone; I couldn't even draw a straight line. She was never into sports; I've always been. Her hand, it fit mine.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Pact

“أنا أقل مما تظن‬
الفراغات تملؤني بالطول والعرض
أنا رقعة شطرنج.

كلما جئت جميلا،
تكشُف قبح العالم أكثر.

أخاف أن أعتادك‬‫
أخاف ألا أفعل.”
― بثينة العيسى, كبرت ونسيت أن أنسى

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath