apostrophe A

“In Islam, prayer is a full- body experience: you stand, bow, stand, kneel with your forehead to the ground, and stand again repeating a variation of this cycle several times You become part of a mathematical algorithm linking earthly and heavenly bodies. Your calendar is based on the phases of the moon, your daily prayers on the movement of the sun across the sky. Mecca becomes an idea with a location. You orient yourself toward it not with a compass, but with a Great Circle, calculating the shortest distance between the spot where you stand and the Kaaba, the shrine in Mecca believed to be built by Abraham.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

“As a dialectic of modernity, nationalism is the pay-off for a disenchanted world, the mythic, naturalised, non-rational fantasy produced by the demythologising, “rational” development of the state. . . It comes to stand in for a guiding force of social and individual life. This in turn leads to identification with the nation and its figureheads as the grounding for subjectivity. Nationalism offers autonomy (self-determination) and particularity in the form of subjugation to a universal. It is an instituting moment for the self, society and the state. . . Humanity no longer worships gods but rather itself as the transcendental nation. We become nationalised narcissists.”
― Wael B. Hallaq, الدولة المستحيلة: الإسلام والسياسة ومأزق الحداثة الأخلاقي

“People with promise, people dependent and depended upon, people loving and beloved, one after another, in a line, in a river, no fount and no outlet, a long bright river of departed souls.”
― Liz Moore, Long Bright River

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway