Fatima Bouallal

“وأسعد الخلق قليل الفضول
من يهجر الناس ويرضى القليل”
― Omar Khayyám, رباعيات خيام

“If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“ لكن الناس في مصر كغيرها من بلاد العرب تتسلى بالحكايات، أبطالعا شخصيات حقيقة يعرفها الجميع، على رأسهم طبعا رئيس الدولة، فهو قمة الهرم الأكبر فوق الأرض. لا يعلوه إلا الله الجالس على عرش السماء، وكان الناس يخلطون دائما بين شخصية الجالس على عرش الأرض والجالس على العرش السماوي. هذه عادة الناس في كل مكان وزمان. لأسباب متعددة، منها أن رؤساء الدول منذ نشوء الدولة في التاريخ يتخفون وراء اسم الله. يصدرون الأوامر باسم الله. يبدأون أي خطاب للناس باسم الله. كيف يمكن إذن للناس أن تفصل بين لسان رئيس الدولة ولسان الله سبحانه وتعالى؟!”
― نوال السعداوي, الإله يقدم إستقالته في إجتماع القمة

“I’ll be your family now,” he says.
“I love you,” I say.
I said that once, before I went to Erudite headquarters, but he was asleep then. I don’t know why I didn’t say it when he could hear it. Maybe I was afraid to trust him with something so personal as my devotion. Or afraid that I did not know what it was to love someone. But now I think the scary thing was not saying it before it was almost too late. Not saying it before it was almost too late for me.
I am his, and he is mine, and it has been that way all along.
He stares at me. I wait with my hands clutching his arms for stability as he considers his response.
He frowns at me. “Say it again.”
“Tobias,” I say, “I love you.”
His skin is slippery with water and he smells like sweat and my shirt sticks to his arms when he slides them around me. He presses his face to my neck and kisses me right above the collarbone, kisses my cheek, kisses my lips.
“I love you, too,” he says.”
― Veronica Roth, Insurgent