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Cry, my dear. Never be ashamed of your tears. Cry and everyone knows you’re alive.’
one should be even gentler with the living than with the dead, because, after all, they were the ones struggling to make sense of this world, weren’t they?
D/Ali said that, as a rule, people who overused the word ‘natural’ did not know much about the ways of Mother Nature. If you told them how snails, worms and black sea bass were hermaphrodites, or male seahorses could give birth, or male clownfish turned female halfway through their lives, or male cuttlefish were transvestites, they would be surprised. Anyone who studied nature closely would think twice before using the word ‘natural’.
The world is no longer the same for the one who has fallen in love, the one who is at its very centre; it can only spin faster from now on.
Did the dead remember the past, and, if so, which parts of it, and in what order? How could the mind condense an entire life into the time it took to boil a kettle?
‘Grief is a swallow,’ he said. ‘One day you wake up and you think it’s gone, but it’s only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.’
How could meditation help you to quieten your mind when you needed to quieten your mind in order to meditate? She lived with an endless commotion inside.
Nalan grabbed the ashtray, weighed it on her palm. Then, all of a sudden, she hurled it over the railing. It shattered on the pavement below. The man, having managed to spring back and dodge the blow, gawped, his face pale, his jaw tight. ‘Idiot!’ yelled Nalan. ‘Do I whistle at your hairy legs, huh? Do I hassle you? How dare you talk to me like that?’
‘Why pray when God is no good at listening? It’s called Divine Deafness.
Perhaps nothing was worth worrying about in a city where everything was constantly shifting and dissolving, and the only thing they could ever rely on was this moment in time, which was already half gone.
what was love if it wasn’t nursing someone else’s pain as if it were your own?
why was the price of not saying the right words at the right time so high?
one of the endless tragedies of human history was that pessimists were better at surviving than optimists, which meant that, logically speaking, humanity carried the genes of people who did not believe in humanity.
