Noor > Noor's Quotes

“إن النفس الحزينة المتألمة تجد راحة بانضمامها الى نفس أخرى تماثلها بالشعور وتشاركها بالإحساس مثلما يستأنس الغريب بالغريب في أرض بعيدة عن وطنهما
- فالقلوب التي تدنيها أوجاع الكآبة بعضها من بعض لا تفرقها بهجة الأفراح وبهرجتها. فرابطة الحزن أقوى في النفوس من روابط الغبطة والسرور. والحب الذي تغسله العيون بدموعها يظلّ طاهراً وجميلاً وخالداً.”
― جبران خليل جبران, The Broken Wings

“We love each other like matches in the dark. We don't talk, we catch fire instead ”
― Mathias Malzieu, La Mécanique du cœur

“I just want to escape my own body and project sunlight on to the walls for her to see, so she warms up and yearns for my arms.”
― Mathias Malzieu, La Mécanique du cœur

“-Oui, je suis trés malheureuse.
C'est évident, ma chère enfant. Tu es malheureuse parce qu'il serait anormal, voire indécent d'être heureux quand on est Algérien, ou tout simplement quand on a du coeur.”
― Malek Haddad, L'élève Et La Leçon

“But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Le plus clair de mon temps je le passe à l'obscurcir.”
― Boris Vian, L'écume des jours

“و لم يكن الوقت مناسبا لحلمي الكبير الذي لا أريد أن أسميه "الثورة الثقافية" . بعدها لم تعد هاتان الكلمتان مجتمعتين أو متفرقتين تعنيان شيئا عندنا”
― أحلام مستغانمي, ذاكرة الجسد

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais

“What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Most of the problems of the world stem from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don't ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in you eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.”
― Joan Didion

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Très vite dans ma vie il a été trop tard. A dix-huit ans il était déjà trop tard. Entre dix-huit ans et vingt-cinq ans mon visage est parti dans une direction imprévue. A dix-huit ans j’ai vieilli.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“لاتقل لي : ليتني بائع خبز في الجزائر
لأغني مع ثائر !
لاتقل لي : ليتني راعي مواشٍ في اليمن
لأغني لانتفاضات الزمن !
لاتقل لي : ليتني عامل مقهى في هفانا
لأغني لانتصارات الحزانى !
لاتقل لي : ليتني أعمل في أسوان حمالاً صغير
لأغني للصخور
ياصديقي ! لن يصب النيل في الفولغا
ولا الكونغو ، ولا الأردن ، في نهر الفرات !
كل نهر ، وله نبع ..ومجرى ..وحياة!

ياصديقي !..أرضنا ليست بعاقر
كل أرض ، ولها ميلادها
كل فجر ، وله موعد ثائر!”
― محمود درويش

“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
― Louise Gluck

“For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. We love only the person we can eat. The person we hate we ‘can’t swallow.’ That one makes us vomit. Even our friends are inedible. If we were asked to dig into our friend’s flesh we would be disgusted. The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor’s edge of ambivalence.
The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary. And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear. The spring is already in mid-air. The heart stops. The heart takes off again. Everything in love is oriented towards this absorption.

At the same time real love is a don’t-touch, yet still an almost-touching. Tact itself: a phantom touching.

Eat me up, my love, or else I’m going to eat you up.

Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows there is no greater proof of love than the other’s appetite, who is dying to be eaten up, who says or doesn’t say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you won’t eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me.

Sign my death with your teeth”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."

Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“People do not see you, / They invent you and accuse you.”
― Hélène Cixous

“And so when you have lost everything, no more roads, no direction, no fixed signs, no ground, no thoughts able to resist other thoughts, when you are lost, beside yourself, and you continue getting lost, when you become the panicky movement of getting lost, then, that’s when, where you are unwoven weft, flesh that lets strangeness come through, defenseless being, without resistance, without batten, without skin, inundated with otherness, it’s in these breathless times that writings traverse you, songs of an unheard-of purity flow through you, addressed to no one, they well up, surge forth, from the throats of your unknown inhabitants, these are the cries that death and life hurl in their combat.”
― Hélène Cixous, "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays