Haya Hatem > Haya's Quotes

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“كل أحلام العالم لا تغنيك عن لحظة الدَّفا اللي يقدر يديها لك وجه إنساني”
― أروى صالح, المبتسرون: دفاتر واحدة من جيل الحركة الطلابية

“It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“لو خيّرت بين الحقيقة والصديق، لاخترت الصديق دائمًا”
― ميلان كونديرا, Identity

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot

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

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid. ”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“أعتقد أنني خلال العشرين سنة الأخيرة دافعت عن نفسي ضد العواطف دون أن أفكر أن كل واحدة من تلك الدفاعات كانت تعني بتراً ما.”
― Juan José Millás, هكذا كانت الوحدة

“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“If we could truly see ourselves the way others see us we'd disappear on the spot.”
― Émile Michel Cioran

“To have committed every crime but that of being a father.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“ما أعرف يقوّض ما أريد”
― Emil Cioran, لو كان آدم سعيدًا

“Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.”
― Franz Kafka

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”
― Franz Kafka

“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.”
― Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“I had forgotten I was alone; I sat there, waiting for nothing, oblivious to the time.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement.

Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“أنا ممتنة كثيراً
لمن لا أحبهم
أشعر بارتياح ,
لأنهم قريبون من شخص آخر ,
بفرح لأنني لست
ذئب حملانهم
أشعر بسلام معهم
بحرية معهم
وهذا ما لا يمنحه الحب
أغفر
ما لايمكن للحب أن يغفره
من اللقاء إلى الرسالة
لا يدوم الوقت إلى مالا نهاية
إنها ببساطة أيام معدودات أو أسابيع”
― فيسوافا شيمبروسكا, النهاية و البداية وقصائد أخرى

“بعد فترة تتعلم الفرق الواهي
بين الإمساك بيد وبين تكبيل روح،
وتتعلم أن الحب لا يعني الاتكاء
وأن الصحبة لا تعني الأمان.
وتبدأ بالتعلم أن القبل لا تعني اتفاقات مبرمة
وأن الهدايا ليست وعوداً
وتبدأ بتقبل هزائمك
مع رأسك مرفوع وعينيك مفتوحتين
بسمو إمرأة، وليس بحزن طفل،
وتتعلم بناء كل دروبك على يومك الحاضر
لأن أرض الغد غير جديرة بالثقة بالنسبة الى الخطط
بعد فترة تتعلم...
إنه حتى أشعة الشمس تحرق إذا بالغت في الاقتراب.
لذا تقوم بزرع حديقتك وتزيّن روحك
بدلاً من انتظار شخص ما ليحضر لك الزهور.
وتتعلم أنه بمقدورك حقاً الاحتمال...
انك حقاً قوي
وأنك تطوي قيمتك بداخلك...
وتتعلم وتتعلم...
مع كل وداع تتعلم.”
― خورخي لويس بورخيس

“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It was. It will never be again. Remember.”
― Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude