Menna Yasser

“Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“أنا أقل مما تظن‬
الفراغات تملؤني بالطول والعرض
أنا رقعة شطرنج.

كلما جئت جميلا،
تكشُف قبح العالم أكثر.

أخاف أن أعتادك‬‫
أخاف ألا أفعل.”
― بثينة العيسى, كبرت ونسيت أن أنسى

“He wished he knew what to say to make her feel better, but the truth was, he
didn’t feel all that great himself and he didn’t know if there were even any words in the English
language to take away this kind of stunning shock, this understanding that the world isn’t the place
you thought it was.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“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