Diaa Sersawi > Diaa's Quotes

“كيف أسمح لنفسي
أن أكون وحيدة قبل الثلاثين ؟”
― إيمان مرسال, ممر معتم يصلح لتعلم الرقص

“I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence

-from "Splittings”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“يبدو أنني أرثُ الموتى
ويوماً ما
سأجلسُ وحدي على المقهى
بعد موتِ جميع مَن أُحبُّهم
دون أيّ شعورٍ بالفقد
حيثُ جسدي سلةٌ كبيرةٌ
ترك فيها الراحلون
ما يدلّّ عليهم.”
― إيمان مرسال, ممر معتم يصلح لتعلم الرقص

“Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“صرت أخاف أنْ أطيل النوم, كي لايذهب الجميع وأظل وحدي.”
― زياد الرحباني, صديقي الله

“شكر خاص

شكرن لنظام المدارس الذي علمني كيفيت الكتابة. ولولاه لما كنت قادر علا كتابت هاذا الكتاب...”
― Abdullah Abu Snaineh, احتواء: النكبة ساغا وقصص أخرى

“أخي يبكي, يتلوى ألماً, يبكي الخبز. يصغرني. أبكي معه. أراه يمشي إليه. الوحش يمشي إليه. الجنون في عينيه. يداه أخطبوط. لا أحد يقدر أن يمنعه. أستغيث في خيالي. وحش! مجنون! أمنعوه! يلوي اللعين عنقه بعنف. أخي يتلوى. الدم يتدفق من فمه. أهرب خارج بيتنا تاركاً إياه يسكت أمي باللكم والرفس. اختفيت منتظراً نهاية المعركة. لا أحد يمر. أصوات ذلك الليل بعيدة وقريبة مني. السماء مصابيح الله شاهدة علي جريمة أبي. الناس نائمون. مصباح الله يظهر ويختفي. شبح أمي. صوتها خفيض. تبحث عني. تنتحب. الظلام يخفيني. لماذا ليست قوية مثله؟ الرجال يضربون النساء وهن يبكين ويصرخن”
― محمد شكري, الخبز الحافي

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
― Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying

“Women have been driven mad, "gaslighted," for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each others' sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.”
― Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems.

“and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet--you've not got your niche in creation. But some day that will come, and meanwhile don't shrink from yourself, but face yourself calmly and bravely. Have courage; do the best you can with your burden. But above all be honourable. Cling to your honour for the sake of those others who share the same burden. For their sakes show the world that people like you and they can be quite as selfless and fine as the rest of mankind. Let your life go to prove this--it would be a really great life-work, Stephen.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”
― Toni Cade Bambara , The Salt Eaters

“أي انسان يموت ،لاينتهي بنظر الذين يحبونه إلاَّ اذا غسلوه بالدموع ، الدموع هي ذرات التراب الأخيرة التي تجلّل الميت وتقول انه انتهى .”
― عبد الرحمن منيف, شرق المتوسط

“While I am sympathetic to the political project of an all-encompassing utopian inclusivity, I am less sanguine about its feasibility and more worried about
its cruelty.”
― Joseph Massad

“when the United States and Britain denied their non-propertied classes and their female citizens suffrage, or when the US operated a colonial system of slavery, genocide, and racial apartheid, no culturalist arguments were advanced to explain this grave democratic deficit among white Euro-American property-owning Protestant Christian men either (the only exception was the use by antebellum Northern white abolitionists of culturalist arguments against Southern whites as sexually excessive and libertine—on account of having learned such traits from their Black slaves and from living in a warmer climate—and confining of women, but no arguments were offered to explain the racism of Northern whites against Blacks and Native Americans, let alone Northern intolerance of Catholics and Mormons or discrimination against women).”
― Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“يبحث الواحد عن الحب ثم لا يعرف ما الذي يصنع به، تقبض اليد على اليد ثم تخاف ان يقيّدها ما تقبض عليه.”
― إيمان مرسال, حتى أتخلى عن فكرة البيوت