Nour Al-Ali

“The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“I carried the trace of her lips, of her breath on my skin through streets full of faceless people escaping from offices and shops.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

“Invisible things are the only realities.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Loss of Breath