Abbas K. Rizi > Abbas's Quotes

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”
― Anne Frank

“No greater desire exists than a wounded person's need for another wound.”
― Georges Bataille, Guilty

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“We can say for certain that a writer whose writing appeals mainly to the eye is a bad writer; that if in describing, say, a meeting in a garden he describes roses, lilies, carnations, and shadows on the grass, so that we can see them, but allows to be inferred from them ideas, motives, impulses, and emotions, it is that he is incapable of using his medium for the purposes for which it was created, and is as a writer a man without legs.

Pictures, 1925”
― Virginia Woolf, Oh, to Be a Painter!

“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.”
― Jean-Luc Godard

“You see, I’ve heard of a man whose friend had been imprisoned and who slept on the floor of his room every night in order not to enjoy a comfort of which his friend had been deprived.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Before I speak, I have something important to say.”
― Groucho Marx

“Longing has a favorite season: winter. It is borne of the first drops of water on dry grass and heaves deep sighs of feminine hues, craving moisture. Rain is the promise of a universal wedding. Rain is a promise that what is sealed will open into an essence and that the infinite will reincarnate itself in nature.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

“I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
― Albert Einstein

“به در آمدن ها همه پوچ.باید در فرو بست.و به تماشا نشست.این را میگویی اما از یاد میبری...”
― سهراب سپهری

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.”
― Martin Scorsese

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“I do like him. I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect....

.... Listen, don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else." Franny made her voice stop. It sounded to her caviling and bitchy, and she felt a wave of self-hatred that, quite literally, made her forehead begin to perspire again. But her voice picked up again, in spite of herself. "I don't mean there's anything horrible about him or anything like that. It's just that for four solid years I've kept seeing Wally Campbells wherever I go. I know when they're going to be charming, I know when they're going to start telling you some really nasty gossip about some girl that lives in your dorm, I know when they're going to ask me what I did over the summer, I know when they're going to pull up a chair and straddle it backward and start bragging in a terribly, terribly quiet voice--or name-dropping in a terribly quiet, casual voice. There's an unwritten law that people in a certain social or financial bracket can name-drop as much as they like just as long as they say something terribly disparaging about the person as soon as they've dropped his name—that he's a bastard or a nymphomaniac or takes dope all the time, or something horrible." She broke off again. She was quiet for a moment, turning the ashtray in her fingers.

Franny quickly tipped her cigarette ash, then brought the ashtray an inch closer to her side of the table. "I'm sorry. I'm awful," she said. "I've just felt so destructive all week. It's awful, I'm horrible.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.”
― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“All I can tell you [as an advise] is some things that there are some things that I have thought about for very many years uh this most people don't do that, but I've done several things like that where I've spent many years just in the with some problem in the back of my head and eventually comes up comes!”
― Elliott H. Lieb

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue...Live the questions.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“إختاري

إني خيرتك فاختاري

ما بين الموت على صدري..

أو فوق دفاتر أشعاري..

إختاري الحب.. أو اللاحب

فجبنٌ ألا تختاري..

لا توجد منطقةٌ وسطى

ما بين الجنة والنار..

إرمي أوراقك كاملةً..

وسأرضى عن أي قرار..

قولي. إنفعلي. إنفجري

لا تقفي مثل المسمار..

لا يمكن أن أبقى أبداً

كالقشة تحت الأمطار

إختاري قدراً بين اثنين

وما أعنفها أقداري..

مرهقةٌ أنت.. وخائفةٌ

وطويلٌ جداً.. مشواري

غوصي في البحر.. أو ابتعدي

لا بحرٌ من غير دوار..

الحب مواجهةٌ كبرى

إبحارٌ ضد التيار

صلبٌ.. وعذابٌ.. ودموعٌ

ورحيلٌ بين الأقمار..

يقتلني جبنك يا امرأةً

تتسلى من خلف ستار..

إني لا أؤمن في حبٍ..

لا يحمل نزق الثوار..

لا يكسر كل الأسوار

لا يضرب مثل الإعصار..

آهٍ.. لو حبك يبلعني

يقلعني.. مثل الإعصار..

إني خيرتك.. فاختاري

ما بين الموت على صدري

أو فوق دفاتر أشعاري

لا توجد منطقةٌ وسطى

ما بين الجنة والنار..”
― نزار قباني

“Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe; most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all are works of art, whose life endures by the side of our own that passes away.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“When people are enjoying a film they say "I didn’t see the time go by"… but I think that when time flies and you don’t see time passing by you are robbed of an hour and a half or two hours of your life. Because all you have in life is time. With my films you’re aware of every second passing through your body.”
― Chantal Akerman

“من به آمار زمین مشکوکم اگر این سطح پر از آدمهاست پس چرا این همه آدم تنهاست.؟”
― سهراب سپهری

“it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet