Nadia Asal > Nadia's Quotes

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“تُراك استمعت الى حكايا الناي..وأنين اغترابه ؟
منذ اُقتطعت من الغاب..لم ينطفئ بيّ هذا النواح
فلعل كل من أُبعد عن محبوبه ,
وأحرق الشوق له روحا .. يستمع لقولي، فيعيــه

ولعل كل من فارق موطنه .. لا تبُـح أنفاسه الا بالحنيـن
الى أوانٍ للوصال ..
تُراك .. تسمعني في كل جمع ؟
تسمع أنيني .. وضحكي .. تسمع نواحي!؟
كأنما صرتُ رفيـقاً، لكل مارٍ .. ومرتحل
ولكن كم منهم استمع إلي حقا؟
من منهم أدرك سر هذا الأنين؟
من بين تلك الأنغام السارية
من استمع لروحٍ .. تـئن في قيدها
وقيد .. يذوب في سريان روح ؟؟
إن أنين الناي، نارٌ .. لا هواء!
وأنين الناي .. دفقة الشجن .. حين مازجت الخمر
هذا الناي المنهك .. يروم الوصال ..
فيؤنس أنينه كل من أحرق الشوق أرواحهم.
ان الناي يبوح .. بقصص المجنون
وطريـقه المخضب عشقاً ودماً ..
فإذا ذهبت الأيام .. فقل لها اذهبي ولا خوف
.. ولتبقَ أنت يا من ليس له مثيل في الطهر
لتبقَ في قلبي .. نغمة لا تخبو.
أما الآن، ليُرفع القلم و يُطوى الكتـاب ..
فهذا البحر .. لا يلجه الا أهله
والسلام”
― جلال الدين الرومي

“You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour...”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.


Glanzvoller Stern! wär ich so stet wie du,
Nicht hing ich nachts in einsam stolzer Pracht!
SchautŽ nicht mit ewigem Blick beiseite zu,
Einsiedler der Natur, auf hoher Wacht
Beim Priesterwerk der Reinigung, das die See,
Die wogende, vollbringt am Meeresstrand;
Noch starrt ich auf die Maske, die der Schnee
Sanft fallend frisch um Berg und Moore band.
Nein, doch unwandelbar und unentwegt
MöchtŽ ruhn ich an der Liebsten weicher Brust,
Zu fühlen, wie es wogend dort sich regt,
Zu wachen ewig in unruhiger Lust,
Zu lauschen auf des Atems sanftes Wehen -
So ewig leben - sonst im Tod vergehen!”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.”
― A.S. Byatt

“Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”
― A.S. Byatt

“Mine the long night
The secret place
Where lovers meet
In long embrace
In purple dark
In silvered kiss
Forget the world
And grasp your bliss”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one
sensation, fire, from the other, frost.”
― A.S. Byatt, Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice

“I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“We must come to grief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.”
― Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”
― Christoper Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus

“If we say that we have no sin,
We deceive ourselves, and there's no truth in us.
Why then belike we must sin,
And so consequently die.
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.”
― Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

“All beasts are happy,
For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell.
Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath depriv'd thee of the joys of heaven.”
― Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire! To find some lasting comfort in the arms of anothers fire...driven by a desperate hunger to the arms of a neon light, the heart is a lonely hunter when there's no sign of love in sight!”
― Carson McCullers