Zahra > Zahra's Quotes

“I believe the role of the writer is to tell society what it pretends it does not know.”
― Mariam Khan, It's Not About the Burqa

“THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“In every life there is a moment. A crisis. One that says: what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference is how that knowledge changes them. In most cases, it is simply a case of burying that knowledge and pretending it isn’t there. That is how humans grow old. That is ultimately what creases their faces and curves their backs and shrinks their mouths and ambitions. The weight of that denial. The stress of it. This is not unique to humans. The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Let's not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes - shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old and harboring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“We always expected our external world to reflect our internal one, but it was situations like these that reminded me the world would go on no matter what happened to us individually. It was equal parts reassuring and depressing.”
― Ana Huang, Twisted Lies

“It occurs to me that if anyone ever bullies me again I will warn them one time but probably start to stop loving them, and that if they do it again I will have my final answer, that a person who does that to me does not love me. And then I will explain that their behavior has made it clear to me that I want to leave, and although I will have been clear, I will have been respectful, I will leave without participating in condemnation. I will go without digging deeper into the dark.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“A paradox: The things you don’t need to live—books, art, cinema, wine, and so on—are the things you need to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“It is a certain type of person who feels this way that I feel, and I'm proud to be one, and now I see that I must really not forget that the style of what I find beautiful is incredible to me, that it is incredible to feel lucky to want to want what one wants, to be able to see the rings of yourself this way.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“حوار الوليد والحسين
__
الوليد : نحن لا نطلب إلا كلمة
فلتقل : " بايعت " واذهب بسلام لجموع الفقراء
فلتقلها وانصرف يا ابن رسول الله حقنا للدماء
فلتقلها.. آه ما أيسرها.. إن هي إلا كلمة
الحسين : ( منتقضا ) كبرت كلمة !
وهل البيعة إلا كلمة ؟
ما دين المرء سوى كلمة
ما شرف الرجل سوى كلمة
ما شرف الله سوى كلمة
ابن مروان : ( بغلظة ) فقل الكلمة واذهب عنا
الحسين : أتعرف ما معنى الكلمة...؟
مفتاح الجنة في كلمة
دخول النار على كلمة
وقضاء الله هو الكلمة
الكلمة لو تعرف حرمة
زاد مذخور
الكلمة نور
وبعض الكلمات قبور
بعض الكلمات قلاع شامخة يعتصم بها النبل البشرى
الكلمة فرقان بين نبي وبغى
بالكلمة تنكشف الغمة
الكلمة نور
ودليل تتبعه الأمة
عيسى ما كان سوى كلمة
أَضاء الدنيا بالكلمات وعلمها للصيادين
فساروا يهدون العالم !
الكلمة زلزلت الظالم
الكلمة حصن الحرية
إن الكلمة مسئولية
إن الرجل هو الكلمة
شرف الرجل هو الكلمة
شرف الله هو الكلمة
ابن الحكم : وإذن ؟!
الحسين : لا رد لدى لمن لا يعرف ما معنى شرف الكلمة
الوليد : قد بايع كل الناس يزيدا
إلا أنت.. فبايعه
الحسين : ولو وضعوا بيدي الشمس.. !
ابن مروان : فلتقتله.. اقتله بقول الله تعالى..
ابحث عن آية..
أقتله بقول رسول الله
فيمن خرج عن الإجماع
الحسين : أتقتلني يا ابن الزرقاء بقولة جدي فيمن نافق ؟
أتزيف في كلمات رسول الله أمامي يا أحمق
أتقتلني يا شر الخلق ؟
أتؤول في كلمات الله لتجعلها سوط عذاب
تشرعه فوق امرئ صدق ؟”
― عبد الرحمن الشرقاوي

“The day people stopped thinking they could change someone who didn’t want to be changed was the day fewer hearts got broken.”
― Ana Huang, Twisted Lies

“There was nothing left of me when I took out all the parts that belonged to her.”
― Ana Huang, Twisted Lies

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Your whole life had broken down, Carter. It was chaos. It’s quite natural that you now choose to live in a carefully structured environment. You have control over your world when everything is in its correct place.”
― Joy Ellis, Fourth Friend, The

“The possibility of you is better than the reality of anyone else.”
― Ana Huang, Twisted Hate

“You don’t have to work overtime to get people to love you, Ava. Love isn’t earned, it’s given.”
― Ana Huang, Twisted Love

“I would take a thousand fights with Jules over a thousand easy days with anyone else. Because I didn't want easy. I wanted her.”
― Ana Huang, Twisted Hate

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I was so absorbed in the things that I couldn’t change, I forgot the most important thing.”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I feel I know you so well that I couldn't have known you better if we'd been friends for twenty years. You won't fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you've made me happy forever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you've reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts.

When I woke up it seemed to me that some snatch of a tune I had known for a long time, I had heard somewhere before but had forgotten, a melody of great sweetness, was coming back to me now. It seemed to me that it had been trying to emerge from my soul all my life, and only now-

If and when you fall in love, may you be happy with her. I don't need to wish her anything, for she'll be happy with you. May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of one's life?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“I like revisiting, at certain times, spots where I was once happy; I like to shape the present in the image of the irretrievable past.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Oh, how unbearable is a happy person sometimes!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Because it begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobriety, which are awful! Meanwhile, you hear the whirl and roar of the crowd in the vortex of life around you; you hear, you see, men living in reality; you see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float away like a dream, like a vision; that their life is being eternally renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as another; while fancy is so spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and easily scared, the slave of shadows, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that shrouds the sun... One feels that this inexhaustible fancy is weary at last and worn out with continual exercise, because one is growing into manhood, outgrowing one's old ideals: they are being shattered into fragments, into dust; if there is no other life one must build one up from the fragments. And meanwhile the soul longs and craves for something else! And in vain the dreamer rakes over his old dreams, as though seeking a spark among the embers, to fan them into flame, to warm his chilled heart by the rekindled fire, and to rouse up in it again all that was so sweet, that touched his heart, that set his blood boiling, drew tears from his eyes, and so luxuriously deceived him!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights