T > T's Quotes

“In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people—intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“سنكون كما نحن, قوم عاديون, و إذا كنا أكاذيب, فنحن أكاذيب من صنع أنفسنا.”
― الطيب صالح, Season of Migration to the North

“Now I'm making a decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. If I am unable to forgive, then I shall try to forget. I shall live by force and cunning."­”
― Tayeb Saleh, Season of Migration to the North

“إننى أسمع فى هذه المحكمة صليل سيوف الرومان فى قرطاجة، وقعقعة سنابك خيل اللنبي و هي تطأ أرض القدس،البواخر مخرت أول مرة تحمل المدافع لا الخبز ،وسكك الحديد أنشئت أصلا لنقل الجنود. و قد أنشأوا المدارس ليعلمونا كيف نقول "نعم" بلغتهم. إنهم جلبوا إلينا جرثومة العنف الأوروبي الأكبر الذى لم يشهد العالم مثيله من قبل فى السوم وفى فردان، جرثومة مرض فتاك أصابهم منذ أكثر من ألف عام. نعم يا سادتي، إنني جئتكم غازياً فى عقر داركم. قطرة من السم الذي حقنتم به شرايين التاريخ. أنا لست عطيلا. عطيل كان أكذوبة.”
― الطيب صالح, Season of Migration to the North

“مثلنا تماماً يولدون ويموتون وفي الرحلة من المهد إلى اللحد يحلمون أحلاماً بعضها يصدق وبعضها يخيب ،يخافون من المجهول وينشدون الحب ويبحثون عن الطمأنينة في الزوج والولد”
― الطيب صالح, Season of Migration to the North

“I want to take my rightful share of life by force, I want to give lavishly, I want love to flow from my heart, to ripen and bear fruit. There are many horizons that must be visited, fruit that must be plucked, books read, and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed with vivid sentences in a bold hand.”
― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

“إنني أريد أن آخذ حقي من الحياة عنوة.أريد أن أعطي بسخاء، أريد أن يفيض الحب من قلبي فينبع ويثمر.ثمة آفاق كثيرة لابد أن تزار، ثمة ثمار يجب أن تقطف، كتب كثيرة تقرأ، وصفحات بيضاء في سجل العمر، سأكتب فيها جملاً واضحة بخط جريء.”
― الطيب صالح, Season of Migration to the North

“Cold men destroy women,” my mother wrote me years later. “They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes—you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect’s drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone.”
― Lorrie Moore

“In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

“I am not okay. Not at all and haven't been for some time. I did not tell her how discouraged I felt and that I was ashamed I was not more resilient and all the rest of it which included wanting a bigger life but that so far I had not been bold enough to make a bid for things I wanted to happen and I feared it was written in the stars that I might end up with a reduced life like hers...”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.”
― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“After all, in the final analysis, man is a cause.”
― Ghassan Kanafani, Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories

“Everybody has to die, Firdaus. I will die, and you will die. The important thing is how to live until you die.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin