Youmna > Youmna's Quotes

“!لك شيء في هذا العالم.. فقم”
― غسان كنفاني

“there’s a universe swirling inside you. you have to learn to be your own earth, wind, fire and water. you are a natural phenomenon— not a natural disaster.”
― K.Y. Robinson, The Chaos of Longing

“Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“It hurts to want it all, so many things that can't coexist within the same life.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“You know, it isn’t really surprising that there are things about ourselves that still remain a mystery to us,” he said. “Maybe we should be comforted that the knowledge is there, even if it’s withheld for a while.”
― Philip Pullman, Serpentine

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I want people to stop asking if I love this country. No. Ask if it loves me.”
― Noor Hindi, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.

“Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.”
― Hafiz of Shiraz

“Don’t waste your damn life trying to smother a spark what wants to be a blaze.”
― Venessa Vida Kelley, When the Tides Held the Moon

“Sometimes it feels like I didn't even exist before that. Like you invented me.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“Suddenly we’re not kids anymore, and it feels like it happened overnight, so fast I didn’t have time to notice, to let go of everything that used to matter so much, to see that the old wounds that once felt like gut-level lacerations have faded to small white scars, mixed in among the stretch marks and sunspots and little divots where time has grazed against my body.
I’ve put so much time and distance between myself and that lonely girl, and what does it matter? Here is a piece of my past, right in front of me, miles away from home. You can’t outrun yourself. Not your history, not your fears, not the parts of yourself you’re worried are wrong.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: "It's there.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.”
― Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil - rich, fertile soil.
She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
She could plant a forest inside herself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library