Nanis William > Nanis's Quotes

“لم أكن أعرف أنّ للذاكرة عطراً أيضاً.. هو عطر الوطن.”
― أحلام مستغانمي, ذاكرة الجسد

“الدوار هو العشق، هو الوقوف على حافة السقوط الذي لا يقاوم، هو التفرج على العالم من نقطة شاهقة للخوف، هو شحنة من الإنفعالات والأحاسيس المتناقضة, التي تجذبك للأسفل والأعلى في وقت واحد، لأن السقوط دائما اسهل من الوقوف على قدمين خائفتينّ”
― أحلام مستغانمي, ذاكرة الجسد

“الأشياء الأجمل، تولد احتمالا... و ربما تبقى كذلك.”
― Ahlam Mosteghanemi, ذاكرة الجسد

“ألم يقل (برنارد شو) " تعرف أنك عاشق عندما تبدأ في التصرف ضد مصلحتك الشخصية"!”
― أحلام مستغانمي, ذاكرة الجسد

“هناك أناس ولدوا هكذا على جسر معلق. جاءو إلى العالم بين رصيفين وطريقين وقارتين. ولدوا وسط مجرى الرياح المضادة, وكبروا وهم يحاولون أن يصالحوا بين الأضاد داخلهم”
― أحلام مستغانمي, ذاكرة الجسد

“اليس هذا المجتمع الذي يذيع أغاني الحب والغرام هو نفسه المجتمع الذي ينصب المشنقة لكل من وقع في الحب والغرام؟”
― Nawal El Saadawi, مذكرات طبيبة

“Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money.”
― Nawal El Saadawi

“I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“What we require is not a formal return to tradition and religion, but a rereading, a reinterpretation, of our history that can illuminate the present and pave the way to a better future. For example, if we delve more deeply into ancient Egyptian and African civilisations we will discover the humanistic elements that were prevalent in many areas of life. Women enjoyed a high status and rights, which they later lost when class patriarchal society became the prevalent social system.”
― Nawal El Saadawi

“ثلاثون عاماً من عمري دون أن أعرف الحقيقة، ودون أن أفهم الحياة، دون أن أحقق ذاتي، وكيف كنت أحققها وأنا لا أفكر إلا في أن آخذ وآخذ وتحقيق الذات لا يكون إلا بأن أعطي وأعطي، ولكن كيف كان يمكنني أن أعطي شيئاً ليس له عندي وجود ؟”
― Nawal El Saadawi, مذكرات طبيبة

“Ever since I was a child I used to hear my father say: ‘If the price we pay for freedom is high, we pay a much higher price if we accept to be slaves.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Walking through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words

“I discovered that all these rulers were men. What they had in common was an avaricious and distorted personality, a never-ending appetite for money, sex and unlimited power. They were men who sowed corruption on the earth, and plundered their peoples, men endowed with loud voices, a capacity for persuasion, for choosing sweet words and shooting poisoned arrows. Thus, the truth about them was revealed only after their death, and as a result I discovered that history tended to repeat itself with a foolish obstinacy.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another. Because I was intelligent I preferred to be a free prostitute, rather than an enslaved wife.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“I came to realize that a female employee is more afraid of losing her job than a prostitute is of losing her life. An employee is scared of losing her job and becoming a prostitute because she does not understand that the prostitute’s life is in fact better than hers. And so she pays the price of her illusory fears with her life, her health, her body, and her mind. She pays the highest price for things of the lowest value. I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one. I also knew that if I lost my job, all I would lose with it was the miserable salary, the contempt I could read every day in the eyes of the higher level executives when they looked at the lesser female officials, the humiliating pressure of male bodies on mine when I rode in the bus, and the long morning queue in front of a perpetually overflowing toilet.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“I felt the sudden touch of him, like a dream remembered from the distant past, or some memory that began with life. My body pulsed with an obscure pleasure, or with a pain that was not really pain but pleasure, with a pleasure I had never known before, had lived in another life that was not my life, or in another body that was not my body.

......


I held his eyes fast in mine. I reached out and took his hand in mine. The feel of our hands touching was strange, sudden. It made my body tremble with a deep, distant pleasure, older than the age of remembered life, deeper than the consciousness carried within me throughout. I could feel it somewhere in my being, like a part which had been born with me when I was born, but had not grown with me when I had grown. Or like something I had known before being born, and left behind.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“I was like a woman walking through an enchanted world to which she does not belong. She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it. She experi-ences the rare pleasure of having no ties with anyone, of having broken with everything, of having cut all relations with the world around her, of being completely independent and living her independence completely, of enjoying freedom from any subjection to a man, to marriage, or to love; of being divorced from all limitations whether rooted in rules and laws in time or in the universe. If the first man who comes along does not want her, she will have the next, or the one after. No need to wait any longer for just one man. No need to be sad when he does not turn up, or to expect anything and suffer when one’s hopes are razed to the ground. She no longer hopes for anything or desires anything. She no longer fears anything, for everything which can hurt her she has already undergone.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“When timeless moments solicit you, accept the invitation. Go deep within it, until you find yourself in your absence.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“The real quest begins when this not-knowing ceases to be an agnostic concept and becomes a living experience.”
― Jean Klein, Who Am I?: The Sacred Quest

“Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed