Khulud Khamis > Khulud's Quotes

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”
― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems

“ما أجهل الناس الذين يتوهمون أن المحبة الصادقة بكل أشكالها تتولد بالمعاشرة الطويلة والمرافقة المستمرة …إن المحبة الحقيقية هي ابنة التفاهم الروحي ..وإن لم يتم هذا التفاهم بلحظة واحدة ، لا يتم بعام ولا باجيأل كاملة.”
― جبران خليل جبران

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“When you’re young – but even now – how do you understand this?’ he said when he first spoke of it, walking the night streets. ‘You can’t understand it. It makes no sense. You can allow yourself to be swallowed by your anger, but this will kill you. And yet how can you look at the panther, how can you look him in the eye, when he won’t stay still? When he’s nowhere and everywhere, belongs to no one and to everyone? So if you’re me, how you deal with this is that you say, I’ll look at how we talk about the panther. I’ll study the history of history, the ways that we tell the stories, and don’t tell other stories, and I’ll try to understand what it says about us, to tell one story rather than another, to tell it one way rather than another. I’ll ask the questions about what is ethical, about who decides what is ethical, I’ll ask whether it is possible, really, to have an ethics in the matter of history.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“I was suddenly aware, almost in a panic – a joyful panic – of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself. My”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“And so, the Book of Khalid was written. It is the only one I wrote in this world, having made, as I said, a brief sojourn in its civilised parts. I leave it now where I wrote it, and I hope to write other books in other worlds.”
― Ameen Rihani, The Book of Khalid

“How could desire be wrong—the question seized her—if each living being contained it? Each creature was born with the unthinking need to draw each next breath, find each next meal. Mustn’t desire then be integral—a set of essential guideposts on the map of life’s purpose? And mightn’t its very denial then be a desecration?”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Do you wonder, ever,” said Ester quietly, “whether our own will alters anything? Or whether we’re determined to be as we are by the very working of the world?”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“What was there to stop him from choosing some completely different life, after all? Nothing but the fact that he’d never wanted a different life.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Some candle inside him was dangerously close to guttering. A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn’t what you thought it was.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“People go through life trying to please some audience. But once you realize there’s no audience, life is simple. It’s just doing what you know in your gut is right.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“The alternative to the concept of life and death is the void’ – stalk waggling between her lips – ‘would it really be better if this world didn’t exist at all? Instead, we live, make art, love, observe, suffer, laugh and are happy. We all exist in a million different ways so that there is no void, and the price we pay for that is death.”
― Benedict Wells, The End of Loneliness

“Home is not where you are born;
home is where all your attempts
to escape cease.”
― Naguib Mahfouz

“Human consciousness is too vast to fit between the covers of a book, and every experience has too many facets to count.”
― David Lynch, Room to Dream