Alaa > Alaa's Quotes

“وأَنا الغريب بكُلِّ ما أُوتيتُ من
لُغَتي . ولو أخضعتُ عاطفتي بحرف
الضاد ، تخضعني بحرف الياء عاطفتي ،
وللكلمات وَهيَ بعيدةٌ أَرضٌ تُجاوِرُ
كوكباً أَعلى . وللكلمات وَهيَ قريبةٌ
منفى . ولا يكفي الكتابُ لكي أَقول :
وجدتُ نفسي حاضراً مِلْءَ الغياب .
وكُلَّما فَتَّشْتُ عن نفسي وجدتُ
الآخرين . وكُلَّما فتَّشْتُ عَنْهُمْ لم
أَجد فيهم سوى نَفسي الغريبةِ ،
هل أَنا الفَرْدُ الحُشُودُ ؟”
― محمود درويش, جدارية

“الغربة كالموت, المرء يشعر دائما أن الموت هو الشيء الذي يحدث للآخرين , منذ ذلك الصيف أصبحت ذلك الغريب الذي كنت أظنه دائما سواي .”
― مريد البرغوثي, رأيت رام الله

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
― Arundhati Roy

“Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America. ”
― Arundhati Roy

“Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk

“It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have both won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living