umaiza > umaiza's Quotes

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“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

“In a world where there is so much to grieve and so little good to take? I grieve nothing. I take everything.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me

“Ignite, my love. Ignite.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me

“I didn't believe it was possible to hide a woman's beauty. I thought women were gorgeous no matter what they wore, and I didn't think they owed anyone an explanation for their sartorial choices. Different women felt comfortable in different outfits.
They were all beautiful.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“Men are always so baffled by women’s clothing. So many opinions about a body that does not belong to them. Cover up, don’t cover up - no one can seem to decide.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Restore Me

“Water that never moves." I say to him. "Its fine for a little while. You can drink from it and it'll sustain you. But if it sits too long it goes bad. It grows stale. It becomes toxic." I shake my head. "I need waves. I need waterfalls. I want rushing currents.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me

“The moon is a loyal companion.
It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human.
Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“My body is not unlike the moon, cratered so thoroughly by brutality it’s hard to imagine it untouched by violence.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Believe Me

“I think I might fetch you the moon if only to spare your tears again.”
― Tahereh Mafi, This Woven Kingdom

“I’m not sure. But there’s something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There’s a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we’d never say in the light.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me

“And we are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives we did not choose.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me

“Maybe it was enough, i thought, that i knew someone like him existed in this world. Maybe it was enough that our lives had merged and diverged and left us both transformed. Maybe it was enough to have learned that i love was the unexpected weapon, that it was the knife i'd needed to cut through the Kevlar i wore every day.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“We’re running out of time, he said.

As if time were the kind of thing you could run out of, as if it were measured into bowls that were handed to us at birth and if we ate too much or too fast or right before jumping into the water then our time would be lost, wasted, already spent.

But time is beyond our finite comprehension. It’s endless, it exists outside of us; we cannot run out of it or lose track of it or find a way to hold on to it. Time goes on even when we do not.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“Time goes on even when we do not.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures.
No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me

“I felt like crying. I felt like crying and screaming all at the same time, but i didn't want to give in to feeling. I just wanted to push through this. I wanted to survive it with out losing my head”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“Words are like seeds, I think, planted into our hearts at a tender age. They take root in us as we grow, settling deep into our souls. The good words plant well. They flourish and find homes in our hearts. They build trunks around our spines, steadying us when we’re feeling most flimsy; planting our feet firmly when we’re feeling most unsure. But the bad words grow poorly. Our trunks infest and spoil until we are hollow and housing the interests of others and not our own. We are forced to eat the fruit those words have borne, held hostage by the branches growing arms around our necks, suffocating us to death, one word at a time.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me

“Music made my day so much easier. Walking through the halls at school was somehow easier; sitting alone all the time was easier. I loved that no one could tell i was listening to music and that, because no one knew, i was never asked to turn it off. I'd had multiple conversations with teachers who had no idea i was only half hearing whatever they were saying to me, and for some reason this made me happy. Music seemed to steady me like a second skeleton; I leaned on it when my own bones were too shaken to stand. I always listened to music on the iPod i'd stolen from my brother, and here- as i did last year, when he first bought the thing- I walked to class like i was listening to the soundtrack of my own shitty movie. It gave me an inexplecable kind of hope.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“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

“Hope is hugging me, holding me in its arms, wiping away my tears and telling me that today and tomorrow and two days from now I will be just fine and I'm so delirious I actually dare to believe it.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“I looked up then, searched the sky. When I found the moon, I found God, when I saw the stars, I saw God, when I let myself be inhaled by the vast, expanding universe, I understood God the way Seneca once did– God is everything one sees and everything one does not see.”
― Tahereh Mafi, An Emotion of Great Delight: A YA Novel of Muslim American Identity, Grief, and Hope in Post-9/11 America

“She'd decided long ago that life was a long journey. She would be strong and she would be weak, and both would be okay.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Furthermore

“How very important and infuriating it is to have to remind a smart person not to be so stupid as to give up on themselves.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Whichwood

“For she had learned long ago that when a home was not found it was forged. Indeed it could be fashioned even from nothing”
― Tahereh Mafi, This Woven Kingdom

“But life cannot be experienced one emotion at a time. It is a tapestry of sensation, a braided rope of feeling. We must allow for reflection even when we suffer. We must reach for compassion even when we triumph. If you spend your days waiting for your sorrows to end so that you might finally live” – he shook his head – “you will die an impatient man.”
― Tahereh Mafi, All This Twisted Glory

“Laughter was a silk that would soften even the roughest moments.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Furthermore

“Tattoos, for example, are very hard to forget. I think there's something about the impermanence of life these days that makes it necessary to etch ink into our skins. It reminds us that we've been marked by the world, that we're still alive. That we'll never forget.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life