Rawan Alsubaie > Rawan's Quotes

“And all I loved, I loved alone.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

“What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul”
― Victor Hugo , Les Misérables

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters.

-Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes ad his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness, 'Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”
― Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.
I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.
The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

“Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“إنه ينبغي علينا أن نخصص في فترة النضج وقتًا لإعادة اكتشاف أهم قراءاتنا التي قمنا بها في الصبا. فإذا كانت الكتب لا تتغير -وهي في الواقع تتغير علي ضوء منظور تاريخي مختلف- فنحن أنفسنا تغيرنا ولقاؤنا الجديد يشكل أحداثًا جديدة.ولهذا فإن كل قراءة جديدة لعمل كلاسيكي هي اكتشاف، مثلها مثل القراءة الأولي. وكل قراءة أولى لعمل كلاسيكي هي في الحقيقة قراءة جديدة.”
― Italo Calvino

“How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane