Fatima > Fatima's Quotes

“...The Qur'an cannot be translated. ...The book is here rendered almost literally and every effort has been made to choose befitting language. But the result is not the Glorious Qur'an, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy. It is only an attempt to present the meaning of the Qur'an-and peradventure something of the charm in English. It can never take the place of the Qur'an in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so...”
― Pickthall M. Marmaduke, The Meanings of the Glorious Qur'an

“If a book did nothing else for you, other than to save you from the company of other people; if all it did was to deliver you from their gossip, and their dull affairs, and their appalling manners, and their rotten Arabic, and their stupid ideas, and their woefully misguided opinions, and above all, from the need to be polite to them; if a book did nothing more than that, it would still be the best friend you ever had.”
― Andrew Killeen, The Khalifah's Mirror

“Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“She stared at the stars like they were pillow for her mind and in their light she could rest her heavy head.”
― Christopher Poindexter

“It's temples and palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment pil'd to heaven.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation

“She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn’t a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile.”
― Pamela Allegretto, Bridge of Sighs and Dreams

“In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet. No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how much you've been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting in your self-knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it's time for breakfast. On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or upturned cups, and the tilted profile of campaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky. Not to mention the seagulls and pigeons, now sharpening into focus, now melting into air. I should say that, good though this place is for honeymoons, I've often thought it should be tried for divorces also - both in progress and already accomplished. There is no better backdrop for rapture to fade into; whether right or wrong, no egoist can star for long in this porcelain setting by crystal water, for it steals the show. I am aware, of course, of the disastrous consequence the above suggestion may have for hotel rates here, even in winter. Still, people love their melodrama more than architecture, and I don't feel threatened. It is surprising that beauty is valued less than psychology, but so long as such is the case, I'll be able to afford this city - which means till the end of my days, and which ushers in the generous notion of the future.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“I've always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don't sleep - some don't - but they live there. Everybody else is just a tourist.
Venice, Italy, for instance, pulls in a millions tourists for their own Carnival season but the actual local population is only a couple of hundred thousand. Lots of empty canals and streets at night, especially when you get away from the big hotels, and the residents pretty much have it to themselves when tourist season slows during the winter.
Jude has character - everybody agrees on that. It also has that thing I like best about a city: You can never own it, but it you treat it with respect it will eventually invite you in and make you one of its true citizens. But like I said, you've got to live there. If you're never around after the bars close, or at the other end of the night as the early workers get up to start another day and the coffee shops and news agents raise their security gates, then you don't really know the place, do you?”
― Tad Williams, The Dirty Streets of Heaven

“Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“أنا شاعرة في السر، أكتب الصمت و أذوب فيه، العالم لا يتسع لقصائدي”
― بثينة العيسى, كبرت ونسيت أن أنسى

“I hear the wind call my name
The sound that leads me home again
It sparks up the fire - a flame that still burns
To you I'll always return

I know the road is long
But where you are is home
Wherever you stay-I'll find the way
I'll run like the river-I'll follow the sun
I'll fly like an eagle
To where I belong

I can't stand the distance
I can't dream alone
I can't wait to see you-yes I'm on my way home

Now I know it's true
My every road leads to you
And in the hour of darkness,
Your light gets me through

You run like the river-you shine like the sun
Yeah
You fly like an eagle-yeah you are the one
I seen every sunset and with all that I've learned
Oh, it's to you, I will always, always, return”
― Bryan Adams, Spirit - Stallion of the Cimarron: Music from the Original Motion Picture

“All shadows of clouds the sun cannot hide
like the moon cannot stop oceanic tide;
but a hidden star can still be smiling
at night's black spell on darkness, beguiling”
― Munia Khan

“when we look up, it widens our horizons. we see what a little speck we are in the universe, so insignificant, and we all take ourselves so seriously, but in the sky, there are no boundaries. No differences of caste or religion or race.”
― Julia Gregson, East of the Sun

“Thirty-nine years of my life had passed before I understood that clouds were not my enemy; that they were beautiful, and that I needed them. I suppose this, for me, marked the beginning of wisdom. Life is short.”
― Iimani David

“There is bound to be turbulence in the clouds of confusion before one can view the friendly skies, and an illuminated landing strip.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Scatter as a prayer
escaping my lips...

as orchids
blooming in clouds.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“مازلتُ أعرف أن الشوق معصيتي..
والعشق والله ذنب لستُ أخفيه..
قلبي الذي لم يزل طفلاً يعاتبني..
كيف انقضى العيد.. وانقضت لياليه..
يا فرحة لم تزل كالطيف تُسكرني..
كيف انتهى الحلم بالأحزان والتيه..
حتى إذا ما انقضى كالعيد سامرنا..
عدنا إلى الحزن يدمينا.. ونُدميه..”
― فاروق جويدة, مختارات من شعر فاروق جويدة: قصائد حب

“It's much easier to be convincing if you care about your topic. Figure out what's important to you about your message and speak from the heart.”
― Nicholas Boothman, Convince Them in 90 Seconds or Less: Make Instant Connections That Pay Off in Business and in Life

“I saw the world from the stars' point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“Every life, no matter how isolated, touches hundred of others. It's up to us to decide if those micro connections are positive or negative. But whichever we decide, it does impact the ones we deal with.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, Infamous

“The worst wounds, the deadliest of them, aren't the ones people see on the outside. They're the ones that make us bleed internally.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, Infamous

“I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.”
― Bob Dylan

“We are permanently walking on a very thin ice whenever we try to measure lasting values in an ever-changing and utterly edgy society, whenever we must define long-term objectives in a short-term spirit. ("Was it all worthwhile?")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If you learn from many wise men who disagree one another,
you will find that there are many wisdoms came out of truth.
In the end, you must find truth and define your own wisdom.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women