Hussein Baher

“Are you happy? he once asked Jude (they must have been drunk).

I don't think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn't want to eat.

But it's for you, Willem.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“It takes a special kind of cruelty to make a baby now, knowing that the world it’ll inhabit and inherit will be dirty and diseased and unjust and difficult.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“I know that loneliness cannot be fully eradicated by the presence of another; but I also know that a companion is a shield, and without another person, loneliness steals in, a phantom seeping through the windows and down your throat, filling you with a sorrow nothing can answer. I cannot promise that my granddaughter won't be lonely, but I have prevented her from being alone. I have made certain that her life will have a witness.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise