Alyaa > Alyaa's Quotes

“If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said


this is how you touch other women
the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.

And you searched your arms

for the missing perfume.

and knew
what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter

left with no trace

as if not spoken to in an act of love

as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.


You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems

“والله ما طلعت شمسٌ ولا غربت
إلا و حبّـك مقـرون بأنفاسـي
ولا خلوتُ إلى قوم أحدّثهــم
إلا وأنت حديثي بين جلاســي
ولا ذكرتك محزوناً و لا فَرِحا
إلا وأنت بقلبي بين وسواســـي
ولا هممت بشرب الماء من عطش
إلا رَأَيْتُ خيالاً منك في الكـــأس
ولو قدرتُ على الإتيان جئتـُكم
سعياً على الوجه أو مشياً على الرأس
ويا فتى الحيّ إن غّنيت لي طربا
فغّنـني وأسفا من قلبك القاســـي
ما لي وللناس كم يلحونني سفها
ديني لنفسي ودين الناس للنـــاس”
― الحلاج

“you aren’t really an adult until you bury a parent or become one yourself. But what no one ever mentions is that for kids of a certain age, divorce is like both of those happening simultaneously”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“It struck me that the Russian word for compassion, sostradaniye, derived from the word suffering, stradaniye, and literally meant co-suffering. A compassionate person was, in Russian, a co-sufferer.”
― Guillermo Erades, Back to Moscow

“And so the geek inherited the earth.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“Ultimately, saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“In the months leading up to their expedition, the Apollo 11 astronauts trained in a remote moon-like desert in the western United States. The area is home to several Native American communities, and there is a story – or legend – describing an encounter between the astronauts and one of the locals. One day as they were training, the astronauts came across an old Native American. The man asked them what they were doing there. They replied that they were part of a research expedition that would shortly travel to explore the moon. When the old man heard that, he fell silent for a few moments, and then asked the astronauts if they could do him a favour. ‘What do you want?’ they asked. ‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘the people of my tribe believe that holy spirits live on the moon. I was wondering if you could pass an important message to them from my people.’ ‘What’s the message?’ asked the astronauts. The man uttered something in his tribal language, and then asked the astronauts to repeat it again and again until they had memorised it correctly. ‘What does it mean?’ asked the astronauts. ‘Oh, I cannot tell you. It’s a secret that only our tribe and the moon spirits are allowed to know.’ When they returned to their base, the astronauts searched and searched until they found someone who could speak the tribal language, and asked him to translate the secret message. When they repeated what they had memorised, the translator started to laugh uproariously. When he calmed down, the astronauts asked him what it meant. The man explained that the sentence they had memorised so carefully said, ‘Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“If you lose it every time he tries to come clean, you’re encouraging him to lie.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Last year I abstained
this year I devour

without guilt
which is also an art”
― Margaret Atwood, You are Happy

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“Men never notice the overcalculating that women do. They think things happen "for some weird reason" while women sing songs and do backbends and dance elaborate moves to make those things happen.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body