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Without anyone knowing, she quenched the fire in her, turning it to ashes.
I touch the flame, I burn; I hold ice, I’m cold. The world is what it is. We’ll all die. What’s the point of safety in crowds? We are born alone, we die alone.’
words from poems and flesh from poets … the same thing, when you think about it.’
She recalled the expensive saffron – not the fake spice but the real deal – sold inside delicate glass tubes in Istanbul’s bazaars. Such was her optimism – limited, confined, perishable.
squeezed between what they were expected to be and what they wished to be.
There are two kinds of intelligence, one acquired, as a child in school memorizes … from books and what the teacher says … the other … intelligence … fluid … a fountainhead from within you, moving out.
But for countless believers, the words in the prayers were holy sounds one was expected less to penetrate than to imitate – an echo without a beginning or an end, in which the act of thinking was subsumed by the act of mimicking.
In the sheltered bosom of faith, one found the answers by letting go of the questions; one advanced by surrendering.
no freedom unless we dare to walk away from what we have become.
Was religion an empowering force for women who otherwise had limited power in a society designed for and by men, or was it yet another tool for facilitating their submission?
For in a world of elusive complexity, only this was clear: diligence was better than idleness, spiritedness preferable to apathy. Questions mattered more than answers; curiosity was superior to certitude. They were, in short, ‘The Learners’.
But absolutism of all kinds is a weakness,’
The problem today is that the world values answers over questions. But questions should matter so much more!
If I am a human, I should be big enough to feel for people everywhere.
He made suicidal tendencies sound like the weather, like a spell of heavy rain. You could not avoid it, but if you knew how to stay dry, you would be less affected by it.
three passions of Bertrand Russell: the longing for love, the search for knowledge and the unbearable compassion for the suffering of mankind.’
