ڪائنات > ڪائنات's Quotes

“I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do.”
― Andy Warhol

“My faith is what they bury when they force me to expose it.”
― Uzma Aslam Khan, The Geometry of God

“Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.”
― Kafka, Franzv

“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

“And I. I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.”
― Anne Sexton

“Do you like me?”
No answer.
Silence bounced, fell off his tongue
and sat between us
and clogged my throat.
It slaughtered my trust.
It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
We exchanged blind words,
and I did not cry,
I did not beg,
but blackness filled my ears,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.”
― Anne Sexton

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”
― Albert Camus

“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.”
― Albert Camus

“We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.”
― Albert Camus

“And never have I felt so deeply
at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.”
― Albert Camus

“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”
― Anne Sexton

“That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow”
― Anne Sexton

“The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.”
― Anne Sexton

“Some women marry houses.”
― Anne Sexton

“To my daughter I will say, when the men come, set yourself on fire.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“The Kitchen
 
 
 
 
 
Half a papaya and a palmful of sesame oil;
lately, your husband’s mind has been elsewhere.
 
Honeyed dates, goat’s milk;
you want to quiet the bloating of salt.
 
Coconut and ghee butter;
he kisses the back of your neck at the stove.
 
Cayenne and roasted pine nuts;
you offer him the hollow of your throat.
 
Saffron and rosemary;
you don’t ask him her name.
 
Vine leaves and olives;
you let him lift you by the waist.
 
Cinnamon and tamarind;
lay you down on the kitchen counter.
 
Almonds soaked in rose water;
your husband is hungry.
 
Sweet mangoes and sugared lemon;
he had forgotten the way you taste.

Sour dough and cumin;
but she cannot make him eat, like you.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“Grandfather’s Hands
 
 
 
 
 
 
Your grandfather’s hands were brown.
Your grandmother kissed each knuckle,
 
circled an island into his palm
and told him which parts they would share,
which part they would leave alone.
 
She wet a finger to draw where the ocean would be
on his wrist, kissed him there,
named the ocean after herself.
 
Your grandfather’s hands were slow but urgent.
Your grandmother dreamt them,
 
a clockwork of fingers finding places to own–
under the tongue, collarbone, bottom lip,
arch of foot.
 
Your grandmother names his fingers after seasons–
index finger, a wave of heat,
middle finger, rainfall.
 
Some nights his thumb is the moon
nestled just under her rib.

“Your grandparents often found themselves
in dark rooms, mapping out
each other’s bodies,
 
claiming whole countries
with their mouths.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“I’ve heard people using your songs as prayer, begging god in falsetto.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“You were a city exiled from skin, your mouth a burning church.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“Her body is one long sigh.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“My heart is too thoroughly dried to be broken in a hurry, and I mean to live as long as I can.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“This is not a letter but my arms about you for a brief moment.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“Or to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most feelings of warmth?

Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

It's a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I'd say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.”
― George Saunders, Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness