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“May life be kind to you, child, and when it is not, may you emerge stronger,”
there are those who say wrong things about us. They utter harmful lies and hurtful slanders. They’ve no right to do this, but they do it anyway. They vilify us not because they know us well. Quite the opposite: they do not know us at all.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. I don’t go around saying horrible things about people I don’t know!” “Of course you don’t; that’s because you’re wise.” Narin is not satisfied with the answer. She does not want to be wise. She wants to understand why people are the way they are and if they can ever change.
“Well, this world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others, I’m afraid, abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.”
“Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire—because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind—when people hate those they have hurt.”
“Words are like birds,” says Mr. Bradbury. “When you publish books, you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in the mansions of the gentry, in farmsteads and laborers’ cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.”
More and more, he comes to realize that people fall into three camps: those who hardly, if ever, see beauty, even when it strikes them between the eyes; those who recognize it only when it is made apparent to them; and those rare souls who find beauty everywhere they turn, even in the most unexpected places.
If poverty were a place, a hostile landscape into which you were deliberately pushed or accidentally stumbled, it would be an accursed forest—a damp and gloomy wildwood suspended in time. The branches clutch at you, the boles block your way, the brambles draw you in, determined not to let you out. Even when you manage to cut down one obstacle, instantly it is replaced by another. You tear the skin off your hands as you work doggedly to clear a path elsewhere, but the moment you turn your back the trees close in on you again. Poverty saps your will, little by little.
Reading is a feast he can never have enough of,
We don’t hear it but there’s water underneath, churning. There are cycles in nature, cycles in history. We call them dewr. Between the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, there’s always a period of confusion, and those are the hardest times, may God help us all.”
what defies comprehension isn’t the mysteries of the world, but the cruelties that humans are capable of inflicting upon each other.”
if you run too fast, you will miss the safe place where you might have hidden yourself.”
Home is where your absence is felt, the echo of your voice kept alive, no matter how long you have been away or how far you may have strayed, a place that still beats with the pulse of your heart.
when we look at a person all we see in that moment is a partial image of them, often subconsciously biased. They appear successful and content, and so we conclude there must be something wrong with us, since we cannot be more like them. But that image is not the full reality and nor are we that simple or static. “We are all like clay tablets, chipped around the edges, hiding our little secrets and cracks.”
words, once impressed on stone, live longer than those who have imagined them. Stories venture beyond city walls, traverse deserts and span ravines. To write is to free yourself from the constraints of place and time. If the spoken word is a trick of the gods, the written word is the triumph of humans.
Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl; Farida Khalaf’s The Girl Who Beat ISIS; Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper of Sinjar: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq; and Christina Lamb’s Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women
