AM ALI > AM's Quotes

“These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.”
― Najwa Zebian

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“if
the ocean
can calm itself,
so can you.
we
are both
salt water
mixed with
air.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“red we smoked a little too much that evening the moon laughed at our madness your eyes were so red that night as i started to fall again in a whole new color a brand new light”
― Zane Frederick, (he)art.

“before it gets good i am an unreliable lover known as the flight risk the one who runs away at any sign of interest or finds the flaw in any love as a means of escape too afraid for any possibilities to show too afraid for any flowers to grow”
― Zane Frederick, (he)art.

“finished our love was rare at least i like to think so when we reached for the stars without even jumping when we danced in a language only we spoke touched each other like colliding flames and fought in the same exact way you made a forest fire out of me and there was always that spark in your eyes i saw it no doubt we seemed like the perfect match right before we burned out”
― Zane Frederick, (he)art.

“a natural disaster memories of him came in waves and hurricanes he was a natural disaster a perfect storm an ocean of hope and the act of being naive but i do not regret jumping in not one bit because i was able to drown and still learn how to swim”
― Zane Frederick, (he)art.

“a fixer upper after attempting to make a home out of you i was able to find a home within myself a fixer upper had to repair the floors repaint the walls change the locks make sure you did not have a spare key to get in”
― Zane Frederick, (he)art.

“Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'it's been an honor to serve my country.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong

“& remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“But why can't the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You're a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I'm wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. "Good for you, man" a man once said to me at a party, "you're making a killing with poetry. You're knockin' em dead.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven – waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just enough for us to slip through.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Books change us. Books save us. I know this because it happened to me.”
― Elif Shafak

“How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“How we see God is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. If God brings to mind mostly fear and blame, it means there is too much fear and blame welled inside us. If we see God as full of love and compassion, so are we.”
― Elif Şafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Some cities you go to because you want to; some cities you go to because they want you to.”
― Elif Shafak, Ustam ve Ben

“Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy, or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love