Aisha Isa

“I am not without you,
that you are with me from the moment I wake until the moment I fall asleep,
that it's you when the wind caresses me,
that it's your voice I hear in the silence,
you whom I see when I close my eyes,
you who make me laugh and sing when I know no one else is around.”
― Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

“I have often wondered what was the source of her beauty, her radiance. It’s not the size of one’s nose, the color of one’s skin, the shape of one’s lips or eyes that make one beautiful or ugly. So what is it? Can you, as a woman, tell me?
I shook my head.
I will tell you: It’s love. Love makes us beautiful. Do you know a single person who loves and is loved, who is loved unconditionally and who, at the same time, is ugly? There’s no need to ponder the question. There is no such person.”
― Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

“Life is a gift full of riddles in which suffering and happiness are inextricably intertwined. Any attempt to have one without the other was simply bound to fail.”
― Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

“I'm not sure I would put it that way. When we get over something, we move on, we put it behind us. Do we leave the dead behind or do we take them with us? I think we take them with us. They accompany us. They remain with us, if in another form. We have to learn to live with them and their deaths.....
I think of them every day, I wonder what they would say at a given moment. I ask them for advice, even today, at my age, when it will soon be time to be thinking of my own death"...”
― Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats