Nadia Rahali > Nadia's Quotes

“Une femme qui pleure et te demande de la protéger c’est Grandiose”
― Tahar Ben Jelloun, L'Auberge des pauvres

“For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“And still the Weaver plies his loom,
whose warp and woof is wretched Man
Weaving th' unpattern'd dark design,
so dark we doubt it owns a plan”
― Sir Richard Francis Burton, Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“When you chase anything in life, you are affirming its lack in your life.”
― Ali Binazir, The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“I look up at the sky, wondering if I'll catch a glimpse of kindness there, but I don't. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the Pacific. And they have nothing to say to me. Clouds are always taciturn. I probably shouldn't be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is inside of me. Like staring down into a deep well. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative often self-centered nature that still doubts itself--that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation. I've carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I'm not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I've carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.”
― Elif Şafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Leila had come to understand that feelings of tenderness must always be hidden. That such things could only be revealed behind closed doors and never spoken about afterwards.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“I've finally experienced what the poet felt. The deep sense of loss after you've met the woman you love, have made love, then said goodbye. Like you're suffocating. The same emotion hasn't changed at all in a thousand years.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hombres sin mujeres

“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

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

“Stop running after the waves. Let the sea come to you.”
― Elif Shafak

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“For puritans of whatever faith, God is in the detail.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“I am going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life.”
― Elsie de Wolfe