Dana Ramadan > Dana's Quotes

“I am haunted by humans.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“مهما عرف الانسان من تجارب فإن فراق الأحبة يظل هو الأكثر وجعا. الله خلقنا لنركن للجماعة. هذا ما جعلنيه الله.

الجماعة شر. والناس ضرر. هو فقط من نحب. ليس العالم إلا من نحبهم. إن فارقناهم فارقنا العالم.

لا يجني الانسان من المحبة إلا ما نحن فيه من شقاء”
― حمور زيادة, شوق الدرويش

“الحزن ككل شيء يذبل. يبدو في فورانه جامحاً لا نهاية له. يعربد في النفس ويصيب كل الحياة بالمرارة. لكنه يخفت رويداً رويداً حتى لا يبقى منه إلا دبيب خافت في الجوف.”
― حمور زيادة, شوق الدرويش

“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree. ”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but... there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like they can't quite remember who they are. They look at the sky too much. They lose touch with their feet. They aren't a patch on a woman except they're better at fixing cars and playing football, just what we need for the improvement of the human race, right?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“من أى بلاد يسكنها ملائكة أنتِ ؟”
― حمور زيادة, شوق الدرويش

“هكذا هو الحب يا بخيت. هكذا هو الحب. أن تصبح درويشاً لمن تهوى.”
― حمور زيادة, شوق الدرويش

“هل ترين تلك النجمة؟ سأصعد إلي السقف ثم أطير نحوها سأخطفها ، وأسرق من القمر خيطاً ، وأصنع لك حجلاً تضعينه حول ساقك”
― حمور زيادة, شوق الدرويش

“لما أنزله حراس السجن عن عموده وحشروه في غرفة العجائب كان ينزف غزيراً . ما كان يبالي أن دمه تسرب كثيراً ، كان يفكر جزعاً :
هل أفقد حبي لها مع دمي ؟”
― حمور زيادة, شوق الدرويش

“في سنوات سجنه السبع كانت تأتي كثيرا، تعبر فناء السجن ليلا لتقف عند باب الغرفة التي ينام فيها. تلتصق بشقوق الباب وتنظر إليه. يزحف حتى يلتصق بالضفة الأخرى من الباب. يحادثها حديثا طويلا. تداعبه وتتدلل. تغضب وتصمت. تحكي وتهزل. يشم المسك من شعرها البندقي.. من الكافر الذي زعم أن الحبيبة تموت؟”
― حمور زيادة, شوق الدرويش

“قولي لي منى كان الأوان. سأرجع بالزمن إليه. سأجبر الشمس أن تعود إلى الوراء. سآتيك قبل فوات الأوان”
― حمور زيادة, شوق الدرويش

“يشتعل رغبة. يتشظى حنقًا. يعض شوقه. يطلب النوم. فتصهل الأحلام الموجعة في روحه. يشتاقها كشوق درويش للجنة”
― حمور زيادة, شوق الدرويش

“قال لها يوماً : " أنتِ بيضاءٌ كالنهار "
عيناها مشاغبتان تحملان حزناً دائماً, أنفها المحبب و شفتاها كما اشتهاهما دوماً .
ما غيَّرها الغياب .
مُربكة .. تماما كالحياة .
مُوجعة مثلها,
ولا أمان لها كالنهر .
يلفها ثوب من نور الشمس .
تحوم حوله, هل تراه ؟ هل تحادثه, أم تتجاهله ؟
ما أقسى الأمل حين تنتظر ما لا تأمن .”
― حمور زيادة, شوق الدرويش