Me-not > Me-not's Quotes

“The Nobodies

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping
poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on
them---will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down
yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their
left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right
foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the
no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life,
screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”
― Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You think my first instinct is to protect you. Because you're small, or a girl, or a Stiff. But you're wrong."

He leans his face close to mine and wraps his fingers around my chin. His hand smells like metal. When was the last time he held a gun, or a knife? My skin tingles at the point of contact, like he's transmitting electricity through his skin.

"My first instinct is to push you until you break, just to see how hard I have to press." he says, his fingers squeezing at the word break. My body tenses at the edge in his voice, so I am coiled as tight as a spring, and I forget to breathe.

His dark eyes lifting to mine, he adds, "But I resist it."

"Why..." I swallow hard. "Why is that your first instinct?"

"Fear doesn't shut you down; it wakes you up. I've seen it. It's fascinating." He releases me but doesn't pull away, his hand grazing my jaw, my neck. "Sometimes I just want to see it again. Want to see you awake.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“بنلف في دواير والدنيا تلف بينا
ودايماً ننتهي لمطرح ما إبتدينا
طيور الفجر تايهة في عتمة المدينة .. بتدور

مابنكتبش الرسايل مابننتظرش رد
...لا حد في يوم سمعنا ولا بنسمع حد
طيور العمر تايهة في عتمة المدينة .. بتدور

ساكنين في عالم يعشق الخطر
فيه الطيور تهرب من الشجر
وتهرب النجوم من القمر
وتهرب الوجوه من الصور

بنلف في دواير ندور ع الأمان
ونلاقينا رجعنا تاني لنفس المكان
ندور .. ندور .. ندور

نحلم ونحلم بالحياة المُفرحة
وأتاري أحلامنا بلا أجنحة
ندور ندور ندور بجناح حزين مكسور
ساعات نشوف في العتمة
وساعات نتوه في النور
ساعات عيوننا بالأسى تفرح
وساعات في ساعة الفرح ننوح

ولا حاضر ولا ماضي
تروس بتلف ع الفاضي
ولا فينا شباب زعلان
ولا فينا شباب راضي

مفيش غير إننا بندووور ..
ندووووور .. ندووووور”
― عبد الرحمن الأبنودي

“Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action;
and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
and I want my grasp of things to be
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the wildest storm of all.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“It must be because you're so approachable,' I say flatly. 'You know. Like a bed of nails.'
He stares at me, and I don't look away. He isn't a dog but the same rules apply. Looking away is submissive. Looking him in the eye is a challenge. It's my choice.
Heat rushes into my cheeks. What will happen when this tension breaks?
But he just says, 'Careful, Tris.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
― Rainer Marie Rilke

“True forgiveness is when you can say, "Thank you for that experience.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening... ”
― rainer maria rilke

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”
― Rilke Rainer Maria

“There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human- in not having to be just happy or just sad- in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The only journey is the one within.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Some prisoners spent more than ten years buried in solitary cells the size of coffins, hearing nothing but clanging bars or footsteps in the corridors. . .[they] survived because they could talk to each other by tapping on the wall. In that way they told of dreams and memories, fallings in and out of love; they discussed, embraced, fought; they shared beliefs and beauties, doubts and guilts, and those questions that have no answers.
When it is genuine, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When denied a mouth, it speaks with the hands or the eyes, or the pores, or anything at all. Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others. ”
― Eduardo Galeano

“Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?”
― Rilke Rainer Maria

“This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don't have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn't play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn't watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you're forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you're genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don't speak, why you don't move, why you've created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you've left your other parts one by one.”
― Ingmar Bergman