Rayyan > Rayyan's Quotes

“Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“She said his mind was tuned to the biggest music there was, the music of the stars.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Maturity, the way I understand it,” he told me, “is knowing what your limitations are.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“Man was exiled from the Garden for eating a single fruit, and now you propose to uproot the whole tree without the angels noticing.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“Society didn’t mind if you broke the rules; it only required you to acknowledge them.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“They had no idea what it was like to live in a place that boasted one of the most sophisticated digital policing systems in the world, but no proper mail service. Emirates with princes in silver-plated cars and districts with no running water. An Internet where every blog, every chat room, every forum is monitored for illegal expressions of distress and discontent.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“If she was pretty and well-mannered, a daughter could marry up; a son could not. A son needed his own prospects.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“Birds make music, river reeds in wind make music. Babies make music. God would not forbid something that is the sharia of innocent creatures.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“I don’t want foreigners involved in my business. Jinn are one thing but I draw the line at Americans.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“Languages are different for a reason. You can’t move ideas between them without losing something. The Arabs are the only ones who’ve figured this out. They have the sense to call non-Arabic versions of the Criterion interpretations, not translations.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“It is only given to women to see without being seen—men must act in the open, or not at all.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“they say that each word in the Quran has seven thousand layers of meaning, each of which, though some might seem contrary or simply unfathomable to us, exist equally at all times without cosmological contradiction.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“I would have done anything for Intisar. Her love was like three kebab meals to me, with tahini and hot peppers. I never took her for granted. Never.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“God, in His mercy, tells us that a good deed is recorded as soon as a person decides to perform it, while a bad deed is only recorded after it has been performed.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“For God also tells us that when you perform an action you believe to be a sin, it still counts as a sin even if it is proven to be permissible. Conscience. Conscience is the ultimate measure of man.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“I think people need a break. It’s not like they’re out there selling bacon and booze. They want to pretend for a few hours a day that we don’t live in this awful hole getting squeezed by State on one side and pious airheads on the other, all while smiling our shit-eating grins so that the oil companies keep shoveling money into our pockets. Surely God wouldn’t mind people pretending life is better, even if it involves fictional pork.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“Give the citizens of our fair seaport a real vote and they will do one of three things: vote for their own tribe, vote for the Islamists, or vote for whoever paid them the most money.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“Wonder and awe have gone out of your religions. You are prepared to accept the irrational, but not the transcendent.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“You can leave but you can always come back. You can live here again. Life can be a circle, not just a line.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“Don't cry over anything that can't cry over you”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“High heels are a plot against women, they throw our spines out and stop us from standing on the ground.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“He paints a simple square house with a triangle roof that has an "S" inside, "Because, Suzanne, you are my home.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“He loved to shock, even with generosity. It was like punching someone.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“A lot of the early jazz artists, of course, couldn't even walk through the front door of the hotels and clubs they were playing in and had to enter through back doors and kitchens, and I think Jean felt this was a metaphor for his place in the art world: he had entered through the back door. He broke into the white art world in a way that had never been done before by any black.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“He refuses to sell his paintings and writes "NOT FOR SALE" on some of them. He is furious because people are writing about his ghetto childhood and call him a "graffiti artist" and "primitive." "They don't invent a childhood for white artists," he says.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“He always appreciated expensive things, as if consuming them would make him valuable.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“I don't believe in God. But I do believe that each of us has some sort of inner dynamic, that we are not always aware of, that guides us in life to witness certain profound things. These profound things change us forever and bring us closer to our ultimate selves. My relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat and the death of Michael Stewart were experiences of this nature.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story