Menna Yasser

“I felt a pang -- a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before.
It was homesickness.
Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“Invisibility, actually, was something he was pretty good at. He'd perfected it over the past twelve years.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in street look not just indeferent but ugly...perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant" the breathing method”
― Stephen King, The Body

“Why hadn’t he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided reality
by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectation
divided by reality-you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.
Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to create
optimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, a
fraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zero
without reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at any
provocation.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes