Omnia Hesham

“Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren't all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstool, trying to talk to her. Everyone likes Tamina. Because she knows how to listen to people.

But is she really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively, so silently? I don't know, and it's not very important. What matters is that she doesn't interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own "It's absolutely the same with me, I..."

The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. The whole secret of Tamina's popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying her ear, never saying: "It's absolutely the same with me, I...”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“يبدو الذهاب الى العمل أو الخروج من البيت مهمة مستحيلة. أتحاشى الخروج ما أمكن. أتحاشى الناس، وأشعر بالوحشة أننى بعيدة عنهم فى الوقت نفسه. لحظة استيقاظى من النوم هى الأصعب. حين أذهب الى العمل وأنهمك فيه، يتراجع الخوف كأنه كان وهماً أو كأن حالتى فى الصباح لم تكن سوى هواجس وخيالات”
― رضوى عاشور, فرج

“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“موجوعة أنا بك أيها المجنون الذي لاتستطيع امرأة فهمه مثلي
موجوعة بحبك امازلت تتلقى رسائلي بشوق كما كنت تفعل دائما؟
العادة قاتله ومع ذلك نحن أحيانا في حاجة ماسة إليها
في حاجة لأن أمارس معك أبسط الأشياء اليومية كأن أقول لك
صباح الخير”
― واسيني الأعرج