Zahraa Modather > Zahraa's Quotes

“The strength I'm looking for isn't the type where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that kind of power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortunes, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“There are a lot of things that aren’t your fault. Or mine, either. Not the fault of prophecies, or curses, or DNA, or absurdity. Not the fault of Structuralism or the Third Industrial Revolution. We all die and disappear, but that’s because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. Our lives are just shadows of that guiding principle. Say the wind blows. It can be a strong, violent wind or a gentle breeze. But eventually every kind of wind dies out and disappears. Wind doesn’t have form. It’s just a movement of air.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“فكم لله من لطف خفي يدق خفاه عن فهم الذكي؛ وكم يسر أتى من بعد عسر ففرج كربة القلب الشجي؛ وكم أمر تساءُ به صباحاً فتأتيك المـسرة بالعشي؛ إذا ضاقت بك الأحوال يوماً فثق بالواحد الفرد العلي؛ ولا تجزع إذا ما ناب خطبٌ فكم لله من لطفي خفي”
― علي بن أبي طالب

“To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn’t come with guarantees – these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. But, I’m learning that recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude and grace.”
― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

“But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
― David Whyte, Consolations - Revised edition: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“The morning is full of storm
in the heart of summer.

The clouds travel like white handkerchiefs of goodbye,
the wind, travelling, waving them in its hands.

The numberless heart of the wind
beating above our loving silence.

Orchestral and divine, resounding among the trees
like a language full of wars and songs.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“Baba Ayub didn’t understand. Just as he didn’t understand why a wave of something, something like the tail end of a sad dream, always swept through him whenever he heard the jingling, surprising him each time like an unexpected gust of wind. But then it passed, as all things do. It passed.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal... I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“This is what's so terrifying about being lonely: the instinctive sense that it is literally repulsive, inhibiting contact at just the moment contact is most required.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“There are sights too beautiful to swallow. They stay on the rim of the eye; it cannot contain them.”
― Olivia Laing, To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

“لبّيكَ لبّيكَ يا سرّي و نجوائـــي لبّيك لبّيك يا قصدي و معنائـي
أدعوك بلْ أنت تدعوني إليك فهـلْ ناديتُ إيّاك أم ناجيتَ إيّائـــي
يا عين عين وجودي يا مدى هممي يا منطقي و عباراتي و إيمائـي
يا كلّ كلّي يا سمعي و يا بصري يا جملتي و تباعيضي و أجزائي
يا كلّ كـلّي و كلّ الكـلّ ملتبس و كل كـلّك ملبوس بمعنائــي
يا من به عُلقَتْ روحي فقد تلفت وجدا فصرتَ رهينا تحت أهوائي
أبكي على شجني من فرقتي وطني طوعاً و يسعدني بالنوح أعدائـي
أدنو فيبعدني خوف فيقلقنــي شوق تمكّن في مكنون أحشائـي
فكيف أصنع في حبّ كَلِفْتُ به مولاي قد ملّ من سقمي أطبّائـي
قالوا تداوَ به منه فقلت لهـم يا قوم هل يتداوى الداء بالدائـي
حبّي لمولاي أضناني و أسقمني فكيف أشكو إلى مولاي مولائـي
اّني لأرمقه و القلب يعرفـه فما يترجم عنه غير ايمائـــي
يا ويحَ روحي من روحي فوا أسفي عليَّ منّي فإنّي اصل بلوائـــي
كانّني غَرق تبدو أناملــه تَغوثُّاً و هو في بحر من المـاء
وليس يَعْلَم ما لاقيت من احدٍ إلا الذي حلَّ منّي في سويدائـي
ذاك العليم بما لاقيت من دنفٍ و في مشيئِتِه موتي و إحيائــي
يا غاية السؤل و المأمول يا سكني يا عيش روحي يا ديني و دنيائي
قُلْ لي فَدَيْتُكَ يا سمعي و يا بصري لِمْ ذا اللجاجة في بُعدي و إقصائي
إِن كنتَ بالغيب عن عينيَّ مُحْتَجِباً فالقلب يرعاك في الأبعاد و النائي”
― الحلاج