Nastaran > Nastaran's Quotes

“عجیب ترین خوی آدمی این است که می داند فعلی بد و آسیب رسان است، اما آن را انجام می دهد به کرات هم. هر آدمی، دانسته و ندانسته، به نوعی در لجاجت و تعارض با خود به سر می برد، و هیچ دیگری ویرانگرتر از خود آدمی نسبت به خودش نیست.”
― محمود دولت آبادی / Mahmoud Dolat Abadi, سُلوک

“انسان چگونه حسی ست ، من چگونه حسی هستم وقتی خودم را ،بارانی ام را ، شال گردنم را و چمدانم را با خود حمل می کنم از جایی که نمی شناسم به جایی که فقط یک احتمال هست برایِ آسودن؟ من چگونه حسی هستم ووقتی ذهنم شاخه ،شاخه،شاخه است که من در هر شاخه اش اسیر و اسیر و اسیرم به جستجویِ نیافتن و نبودِ آنچه در جستجویش هستم”
― محمود دولت آبادی / Mahmoud Dolat Abadi, سُلوک

“نمیدانم. اما چه درهم پیچ و گره خورده است درونم، و چه زوزه های خوار شده ای را می شنوم، و چه نا توانمندی غریب و کشنده ای حس می کنم از بابت آنچه عقل نامیده می شود”
― محمود دولت آبادی / Mahmoud Dolat Abadi, سُلوک

“Who am I trying to fool? I'm well aware that at every stage of history there have been crimes against humanity, and they couldn't have happened without humans to commit them. The crimes that have been visited on my children have been committed, and still are being committed, by young people just like them, by people stirring up their delusions, giving them delusions of grandeur. So why do I imagine that people might improve? Everything going on around us seems to indicate that the values our forebears passed down to us no longer apply. Instead, we have sown the seeds of mistrust, scepticism and resignation, which will grow into a jungle of nihilism and cynicism, a jungle in which you will never find the courage to even mention the names of goodness, truth and common humanity, a corp that is now bearing fruit with remarkable speed. We're obliged to dig our own children's graves, but what's even more shocking is that these crimes are creating a future in which there is no place for truth and human decency. Nobody dare to speak truth anymore. Oh, my poor children ... we are burying you, but you should realize that we are also digging a grave for our future. Can you hear me?”
― Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, The Colonel

“People who are drowning in a sea of problems and have lost all sense of self-worth often grasp at egotism and alienation from everything outside themselves as their only point of fixity, and this can help anchor and fortify them--if only to the point of madness. This is what it can come to, then, if you live in a hostile environment and have lost all your dignity. (61)”
― Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, The Colonel

“What kind of mortuary is this, anyway? It hasn't even got electricity. This sort of town needs more and more of it, what with all the migrants, refugees, and war wounded, not to mention all the executions that are taking place, and all those young comrades on the run...”
― Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, The Colonel

“I'm a stranger in my own home! The tragedy of our whole country is the same: we are all alienated, strangers in our own land. It's tragic. The odd thing is that we have never got used to it. Yet, woe betide us we do. The irony is that, if you really want to be seen as a good Iranian, and especially if you aspire to high office in this country, you first have to be a foreigner, someone who wasn't born here at all. On the other hand, if you were born and bred here and try to remain true to yourself, your country and your people, then alienation is the most lenient punishment you expect.”
― Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, The Colonel

“I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.”
― Paul Auster, Moon Palace

“Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.”
― Paul Auster

“It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.”
― Paul Auster

“When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.”
― Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude

“No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.”
― Paul Auster, Moon Palace

“All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.”
― Paul Auster

“I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.
I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die.”
― Paul Auster, Moon Palace

“In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.”
― Paul Auster, Winter Journal

“Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.”
― Paul Auster

“Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.”
― Paul Auster