Mai Badawy

“There's iron, they say, in all our blood,
  And a grain or two perhaps is good;
  But his, he makes me harshly feel,
  Has got a little too much of steel.'
          ANON.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition whites show towards me…as long as that same respect and recognition isn’t shown towards everyone of our people in this country–it doesn’t exist for me.”
― Malcolm X

“Just remember, Pui, good luck comes at a price. Bad luck is free.”
― Ruta Sepetys, I Must Betray You

“And Ross again knew himself to be happy-in a new and less ephemeral way than before. He was filled with a queer sense of enlightnment. It seemed to him that all his life had moved to this pinpoint of time down the scattered threads of twenty years; from his old childhood running thoughtless and barefoot in the sun on Hendrawna sands, from Demelza's birth in the squarlor of a mining cottage, from the plains of Virginia and the trampled fairgrounds of Redruth, from the complex impulses which had governed Elizabeth's choice of Francis and from the simple philosophies of Demelza's own faith, all had been animated to a common end-and that end a moment of enlightenment and understanding and completion. Someone--a Latin poet--had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come. He thought: if we could only stop here. Not when we get home, not leaving Trenwith, but here, here reaching the top of the hill out of Sawle, dusk wiping out the edges of the land and Demelza walking and humming at my side.”
― Winston Graham, Ross Poldark