Lina

“Cities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. If those hearts darken and lose faith, cities will lose their glamour.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“As already suggested, when the individual first learns who it is that he must now accept a his own, he is likely, at the very least, to feel some ambivalence; for these others will not only be patently stigmatized, and thus not like the normal person he knows himself to be, but ma also have other attributes with which he finds it difficult to associate himself. What may end up as a freemasonry may begin with a shudder. A newly blind girl on a visit to The Lighthouse [probably the Chicago Lighthouse, one of the oldest social service agencies in Chicago serving the blind or visually impaired] directly from leaving the hospital provides an illustration:

„My questions about a guide dog were politely turned aside. Another sighted worker took me in tow to show me around. We visited the Braille library; the classrooms; the clubrooms where the blind members of the music and dramatic groups meet; the recreation hall where on festive occasion the blind play together; the cafeteria, where all the blind gather to eat together; the huge workshops where the blind earn a subsistence income by making mops and brooms, weaving rugs, caning chairs. As we moved from room to room, I could hear the shuffling of feet, the muted voices, the tap-tap-tapping of canes. Here was the safe, segregated world of the sightless — a completely different world, I was assured by the social worker, from the one I had just left….

I was expected to join this world. To give up my profession and to earn my living making mops. The Lighthouse would be happy to teach me how to make mops. I was to spend the rest of my life making mops with other blind people, eating with other blind people, dancing with other blind people. I became nauseated with fear, as the picture grew in my mind. Never had I come upon such destructive segregation.“ (p.37)”
― Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

“أن تصل متأخراً خير من ان لا تصل ابداً هذه الكذبة التى صنعها لنا التاريخ لم تعد كافية لتسد جوع الحقيقة أن الأشياء التى لا تصل بوقتها لا تستحقنا ابدا واجه نفسك مرة وتعرف عليها إن أقسى مايشوه ملا محك فى الحب هو أن تنظ إليه بعين الأنتظار وحين لا تفهم الحب لا تُحمل الأخرين خطيئة أنك غبى جدا وحين لا تسمع لا ترجم الأخرين بتهم قصر أصواتهم”
― معجب الشمري, في عقيدة الحب كلنا يهود

“Even if you cannot change all the people around you, you can change the people you choose to be around. Life is too short to waste your time on people who don’t respect, appreciate, and value you. Spend your life with people who make you smile, laugh, and feel loved.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart