Youssef Arafat

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“It is odd how, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial.”
― Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

“Too bad. And Mozart, not long after writing The Magic Flute, had died--in his thirties--of kidney disease. And had been buried in an unmarked pauper's grave.

Thinking this, he wondered if Mozart had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name "Mozart" will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I will get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I'm part of the form-destroying process of entropy.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“إن الحياة نفسها أكثر جرأة وأجمح خيالاً من الفنان...في الطبيعة يمكن أن يسقط نيزك من الفضاء الخارجي ليقتل الشرير،بينما لا يمكن ان يكتب الأديب ذلك وهو بكامل قواه العقلية....في الطبيعة يمكن لأمريكا ان تلقي قنبلة ذرية على مدينة سكنية عادية لمجرد انها تريد تجربتها بينما لا يجسر أديب مجنون على تخيل ذلك”
― أحمد خالد توفيق, حب في أغسطس