Manal Anwar > Manal's Quotes

“[...] his eyes, behind his glasses, were like the eyes of a dying a man who looks everywhere for healing.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?”
― Danielle LaPorte

“Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“We fear loneliness, Annie, but loneliness itself does not exist. It has no form. It is merely a shadow that falls over us. And just as shadows die when light changes, the sadness can depart once we see the truth."

"What's the truth?" Annie asked.

"That the end of loneliness is when someone needs you." The old woman smiled. "And the world is so full of need.”
― Mitch Albom, The Next Person You Meet in Heaven

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There is often sadness hibernating beneath your angry words. The sadness won’t kill you. The anger actually might.”
― Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.”
― Mitch Albom

“People don't find it very sympathetic or endearing, a woman who puts herself first. Nor do people respect a man who can't keep his wife in line.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“We bear it as best we can,”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“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

“What we do now echoes in eternity.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Most of the time, the universe speaks to us very quietly … in pockets of silence, in coincidences, in nature, in forgotten memories, in the shape of clouds, in moments of solitude, in small tugs at our hearts. — Yumi Sakugawa”
― Yumi Sakugawa

“I love that word. Forever. I love that forever doesn't exist, but we have a word for it anyway, and use it all the time. It's beautiful and doomed.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Let's swap roles. You wait and I don't come back.”
― Mahmoud Darwish

“When one is alone, imperfection must be endured every minute of the day; a couple, however, does not have to put up with it. Aren’t our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose? At the same time it’s really not that bad; that’s an exaggeration and a lie, everything is exaggeration, the only truth is longing. But even the truth of longing is not so much its own truth; it’s really an expression for everything else, which is a lie. This sounds crazy and distorted, but it’s true. Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most - you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love. This, my dear, is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I talk about things with myself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Perhaps you have forgotten. That’s one of the great problems of our modern world, you know. Forgetting. The victim never forgets. Ask an Irishman what the English did to him in 1920 and he’ll tell you the day of the month and the time and the name of every man they killed. Ask an Iranian what the English did to him in 1953 and he’ll tell you. His child will tell you. His grandchild will tell you. And when he has one, his great-grandchild will tell you too. But ask an Englishman—” He flung up his hands in mock ignorance. “If he ever knew, he has forgotten. ‘Move on!’ you tell us. ‘Move on! Forget what we’ve done to you. Tomorrow’s another day!’ But it isn’t, Mr. Brue.” He still had Brue’s hand. “Tomorrow was created yesterday, you see. That is the point I was making to you. And by the day before yesterday, too. To ignore history is to ignore the wolf at the door.”
― John le Carré, A Most Wanted Man

“The only prescription for me is to have a thousand interests.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Days will pass, and you’ll abandon things you were addicted to, and leave someone, and cancel a dream, and finally, accept a reality.”
― Nizar Qabbani

“Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won't remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother's shadow falls.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Grief is love's souvenir. It's our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.”
― Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior

“Do you understand the violence it took to become this gentle?”
― Nitya Prakash

“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“Stand amongst the ashes of a trillion dead souls, and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence is your answer.”
― Javik