Samaa Ahmed > Samaa's Quotes

“She says the lesson to learn is that the world is round, which means that if I run too fast I might end up chasing the very homeland I am running from.”
― Sefi Atta

“Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
― bell hooks

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”
― bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

“Men theorize about love, but women are more often love's practitioners. Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“expect sadness
like
you expect rain.
both,
cleanse you.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“i don't pay attention to the
world ending.
it has ended for me
many times
and began again in the morning.”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

“i love myself.'

the
quietest.
simplest.
most
powerful.
revolution.
ever.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“when you meet that person. a person. one of your soulmates. let the connection. relationship. be what it is. it may be five mins. five hours. five days. five months. five years. a lifetime. five lifetimes. let it manifest itself the way it is meant to. it has an organic destiny. this way if it stays or if it leaves, you will be softer. from having been loved this authentically. souls come into. return. open. and sweep through your life for a myriad of reasons. let them be who. and what they are meant.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“in our own ways we all break. it is okay to hold your heart outside of your body for days. months. years. at a time. – heal”
― Nayyirah Waheed, salt.

“I want to live so densely. lush. and slow in the next few years, that a year becomes ten years, and my past becomes only a page in the book of my life.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“grieve. so that you can be free to feel something else.”
― Nayyirah Waheed, nejma

“be easy. take your time. you are coming home. to yourself. — the becoming”
― Nayyirah Waheed, nejma

“i believe that everyone in the world.
has
one poem.
that is their soulmate.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“i will always be a translation.”
― Nayyirah Waheed, nejma

“yes. yes i do. have the right to be this lush and neverending.”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Nejma

“healing
begins
the moment
you
want it to”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

“i am such a sensitive summer thing.”
― Nayyirah Waheed, salt.

“i am trying to remember you and let you go at the same time. — the mourn”
― Nayyirah Waheed, nejma

“drop a name in the water. drop a name in the water. and a name in the water. drop another name in the water. and another. and another. and another. and another. and another. and another. and another. and another. and another. and another. until there are no more bodies in your body. —”
― Nayyirah Waheed, nejma

“your heart is the softest place on earth. take care of it.”
― Nayyirah Waheed, salt.

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“It still took years for me to let go of learned pattern's of behavior that negated my capacity to give and receive love. One pattern that made the practice of love especially difficult was my constantly choosing to be with men who were emotionally wounded, who were not that interested in loving, even though they desired to be loved. I wanted to know love but was afraid to be intimate. By choosing men who were not interested in being loving, I was able to practice giving love but always within an unfufilling context. Naturally, my need to receive love was not met. I got what I was accustomed to getting. Care and affection, usually mingled with a degree of unkindness, neglect, and on some occasions, out right cruelty.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ”
― James Baldwin

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People