Sarah Emad

“What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”
― Bertrand Russell

“To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“الأحياء يموتون أو يسافرون والموتى دائماً يجيئون. كنت أظن بأن الحياة والموت عالمان منفصلان بينهما حدود واضحة, لكنني الآن أعرف بأنهما متلاحمان. ينحتان بعضهما البعض. الواحد يسقي الآخر كأسه. أبي كان يعرف هذا وشجرة الرمان تعرف هذا جيداً. أنا مثل شجرة الرمان. لكن كل أغصاني قطعت وكسرت ودفنت مع جثث الموتى. أما قلبي فقد صار رمانة يابسة تنبض بالموت وتسقط مني كل لحظة في هاوية بلا قرار. لكن لا أحد يعرف. لا أحد. وحدها شجرة الرمان ... تعرف.”
― سنان أنطون, وحدها شجرة الرمان

“The Happy one "Is to have fine senses and a fine taste.. To be accustomed to the select and intellectually best..to be blessed with a strong bold and daring soul..to go through life with a quiet eye and a firm step, ever ready for the worst as for the festival, and full of longing for undiscovered worlds and seas, men and Gods”
― Fredrich Nietzsche