Nassif Abou Khalil > Nassif's Quotes

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? ”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“لا مرارة على الإطلاق. فالرحيل عن الوطن هو سُنَّة الحياة، وأحياناً، تفرضه الأحداث، وإلا فيجب أن نخترع له عُذراً. لقد ولدت على كوكب، لا في بلد. أجل بالطبع، ولدت أيضاً في مدينة، في طائفة، في أسرة، في حضانة، في فراش. ولكن المهم عندي، وعند جميع البشر على السواء، أنني جئت إلى هذا العالم، إلى هذا العالم! فالولادة هي المجيء إلى العالم، لا إلى هذا البلد أو ذاك، لا إلى هذا البيت أو ذاك.”
― أمين معلوف, التائهون

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“It all ends in tears anyway.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can't hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that's all.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“Love is the kind of thing that's already happening by the time you notice it, that's how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn't change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types -- love where there's an end in sight and love where there isn't.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn’t. Without even noticing what you’re doing, you open up your heart and just start talking to the person next to you—you talk as if you have no audience but the glittering stars, far overhead.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“لأن لديهم ديانة يظنون أن الأمر يعفيهم من التحلي بالأخلاق”
― أمين معلوف, التائهون

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“بينما كنت أسير في البادية، إذ مررت بحجر مكتوب عليه هذا البيت:

أيا معشر العشاق بالله خبِّروا ..... إذا حل عشق بالفتى كيف يصنعُ

فكتبت تحته البيت التالي:
يداري هواه ثم يكتم سرَّه ..... ويخشع في كل الأمور ويخضعُ

ثم يقول: عدت في اليوم التالي فوجدت مكتوبا تحته هذا البيت:
وكيف يداري والهوى قاتل الفتى ..... وفي كل يوم قلبه يتقطعُ

فكتبت تحته البيت التالي:
إذا لم يجد صبرًا لكتمان سرِّه ..... فليس له شيء سوى الموت ينفعُ

يقول الأصمعي: فعدت في اليوم الثالث، فوجدت شابًّا ملقىً تحت ذلك الحجر ميتًا، ومكتوبٌ تحته هذان البيتان:
سمعنا أطعنا ثم متنا فبلِّغوا ..... سلامي إلى من كان بالوصل يمنعُ
هنيئًا لأرباب النعيم نعيمهمْ ..... وللعاشق المسكين ما يتجرعُ”
― الأصمعي

“I yearned for everything long gone.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“Tomorrow will probably be another day like today. Happiness will never come my way. I know that. But it's probably best to go to sleep believing that it will surely come, tomorrow it will come. I purposely made a loud thump as I fell into bed. Ah, that feels good. The futon was cool, just the right temperature against my back, and it was simply delightful. Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late. The thought occurred to me as I lay there. You wait and wait for happiness, and when finally you can't bear it any longer, you rush out of the house, only to hear later that a marvelous happiness arrived the following day at the home you had abandoned, and now it was too late. Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late. Happiness... I”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“I hope I meet lots of people with lovely eyes.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“Heaven forbid if beauty were to have substance. Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“No human is always strong, but no human is weak forever, either.”
― Makoto Shinkai, She and Her Cat

“I don’t fear death. It’s no different from sleeping — it’s like we practice dying every night.”
― Makoto Shinkai, She and Her Cat

“it's your life, and you have to make sure you keep enough of it for yourself”
― Makoto Shinkai, She and Her Cat

“I’d always believed I didn’t take up a lot of space in this world—that it hardly mattered whether I was here or not. When a person left, the people around them got used to their absence. That was true enough. But when I pictured the world without me, and the people I loved living on in it, I couldn’t help but feel like crying.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“I realized that I’d never appreciated how peaceful and precious my life had been before.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“I was also learning that every single person in the world had been hurt by their family at some point. I wasn’t special at all—some people dealt with it well, and some didn’t, but that was the only difference, and either way, we were all nourished and cherished by our families, and at the same time limited and defined by them—that was what it meant to be human, I understood.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“This feels good, I thought. I'm just happy he's here. I don't need him to be mine. I wanted to appreciate him the way I did giant trees in the park, which gave people shelter and relief but didn't belong to anybody.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“...There are so many people out there with lives far less fortunate than ours, and if we got even a taste of what it's like to be them it would crush us, we'd never make it through. Because we're lucky, we've got things pretty easy. But that's not something we need to feel ashamed of.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“It's his desire for freedom that makes him move so fluidly, and makes people feel so contented and joyful when they're around him, I thought.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“We've been lonely for so long, and this was why. We were so lonely we couldn't even know it.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray