Raya Yamisha > Raya's Quotes

“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides on the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“When Karel Gott, the Czech pop singer, went abroad in 1972, Husak got scared. He sat right down and wrote him a personal letter (it was August 1972 and Gott was in Frankfurt). The following is a verbatim quote from it. I have invented nothing.

Dear Karel,
We are not angry with you. Please come back. We will do everything you ask. We will help you if you help us …

Think it over. Without batting an eyelid Husak let doctors, scholars, astronomers, athletes, directors, cameramen, workers, engineers, architects, historians, journalists, writers, and painters go into emigration, but he could not stand the thought of Karel Gott leaving the country. Because Karel Gott represents music minus memory, the music in which the bones of Beethoven and Ellington, the dust of Palestrina and Schonberg, lie buried.
The president of forgetting and the idiot of music deserve one another. They are working for the same cause. “We will help you if you help us.” You can’t have one without the other.”
― Milan Kundera

“ولأننا ضعفاء.. نبكي.
ولأننا بسطاء.. نندفع.
ولأننا قادرون..
نتحايل على عقد الحياة الشائكة: أحياناً بزفرة..
أحياناً بكلمة..
وأحياناً بقوة الذراع!
نتشابه في كل شيء.. في كل شيء..
لكن سامحني : تحت قميصي قلب..
وتحت قميصك.. مسدس”
― نزيه أبو عفش, الله يبكي