Haifa > Haifa's Quotes

“Every man and every woman is a star.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

“I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

“Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

“I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
                                                                                and dress them in warm clothes again.
          How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
                    It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
          it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
                              how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
                                                                                                                        to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
          we're inconsolable.
                                                            Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
                                                                                          Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right into through if the skin wasn’t trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising. I crawled out the window and ran into the woods. I had to make up all the words myself. The way they taste, the way they sound in the air. I passed through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled around for a while, and stumbled back out. I made this place for you. A place for to love me. If this isn’t a kingdom then I don’t know what is.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“You're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not
          harmless. You are not
                    breathing.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“And the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I thought: please don’t grow
familiar. I think I said it out loud:
Please don’t let me love you
that horrible way.”
― Olena Kalytiak Davis, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing

“You should bury more than the dead.
You should try harder.
You should give up.”
― Olena Kalytiak Davis, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing

“Author's Prayer

If I speak for the dead, I must
leave this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over
for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.

If I speak of them, I must walk
on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through the rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year
is it?"
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition and the darkest days
must I praise.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die.”
― Nick Flynn, Some Ether

“How many losses does it take to stop a heart,
to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?”
― Dorianne Laux, Smoke

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
― Bertrand Russell , Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“Not so many moons ago, he had been able to run to the summit of the temple without losing a single breath; however, now he felt like an old camel that laboured under a load of corn. Years pass so quickly, and the dreams of youth are lost forever.”
― Alan Kinross, Longinus The Vampire: Babylon

“Welcome to Irkalla, the Land of the Dead,” the woman said. “I am Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld.”
― Alan Kinross, Longinus The Vampire: Babylon

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell

“My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.”
― Bertrand Russell

“For you, a thousand times over”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“There is a way to be good again...”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“I will follow you to the ends of the world.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns