Abrar > Abrar's Quotes

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant—what makes the heart fail, or why worms age, or even how birds learn songs—and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“How can one capture genes that behave like ghosts," Weinberg wrote, "influencing cells from behind some dark curtain?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Cancer thus exploits the fundamental logic of evolution unlike any other illness. If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The revolution in cancer research can be summed up in a single sentence: cancer is, in essence, a genetic disease. —Bert Vogelstein”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Cancer, Auerbach argued, was a disease unfolded slowly in time. It did not run, but rather slouched to its birth. Auerbach”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The word metastasis, used to describe the migration of cancer from one site to another, is a curious mix of meta and stasis—“beyond stillness” in Latin—an”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Cancer, we have discovered, is stitched into our genome. Oncogenes [cancer causing cells] arise from mutations in essential genes that regulate the growth of cells. Mutations accumulate in these genes when DNA is damaged by carcinogens, but also by seemingly random errors in copying genes when cells divide. The former might be preventable, but the latter is endogenous [originating from within]. Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. We can rid ourselves of cancer, then, only as much as we can rid ourselves of the processes in our physiology that depend on growth — aging, regeneration, healing, reproduction.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“إن الصراع في الوطن العربي، وفي بلدان كثيرة أخرى، هو صراع من أجل السلطة والطرف الذي يتكلم، بل أقول الذي يحس ويشعر ويتألم من موقع المحكوم المضطهد المغلوب على أمره، يجب أن يبدأ من البداية، من المطالبة بحق «طلب الكلمة»، ذلك أن مأساتنا في الوطن العربي هي أننا لسنا فقط محرومين من الكلمة، بل وأيضا من حق طلب الكلمة، والحق الذي من دونه يفقد الإنسان هويته كإنسان”
― محمد عابد الجابري, الديمقراطية وحقوق الإنسان

“اللحظات الحاسمة في تطور الفكر العربي الإسلامي لم يكن يحددها العلم، وإنما كانت تحددها السياسة”
― محمد عابد الجابري, تكوين العقل العربي

“في ميكانيزم الدفاع تلتجئ الذات إلى الماضي وتحتمي به لتؤكد من خلاله وبواسطته شخصيتها ولذلك يعمد الإنسان إلى تضخميه وتمجيده مادام الخطر الخارجي قائما ، اما في ميكانيزم النهضة فالإنسان لا يطلب الماضي لذاته بل يختزله في " اصول" يعيد إحياءها، علي صعيد الوعي كذلك ، والانطلاق إلى المستقبل ، تفكيراً وممارسة . ”
― محمد عابد الجابري, إشكاليات الفكر العربي المعاصر

“I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1