ella > ella's Quotes

“I have a box too. In my head. It’s where I keep the things that are too much, the things that don’t make sense. Images and sounds and smells and textures languish in boxes, stuffed and secreted, stacked up in a room in my mind. They fill the corners, rise higher and higher, box over box, to the ceiling. At times, the room bulges and heaves like a belly in labor. Sharp edges poke at my mind. It’s hardly ever quiet in there.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“The thing is, when you can’t speak, people assume you can’t hear either.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Once the decision was taken, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication-driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Palestinian sources show clearly how months before the entry of Arab forces into Palestine, and while the British were still responsible for law and order in the country – namely before 15 May – the Jewish forces had already succeeded in forcibly expelling almost a quarter of a million Palestinians.12”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Some of the wisest patients and people I have ever met have been children. The heart of a child is wide-open. Children will tell you what scares them, what makes them happy, and what they like about you and what they don’t. There is no hidden agenda, and you never have to guess how they really feel.”
― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets ofthe Heart

“Is it my job, as a Muslim, to try to convince you not to be afraid of me? That my people are not hardwired to hate you, to want to blow you up on a tube or ram you with a van?”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“We are in Serbia. Tomorrow or the next day is Hungary. This is where the real struggle begins, he says. Sweat drips wet and metallic onto my face, into my mouth. How can it possibly get any worse? It will never happen. I will never reach the end. My life is here, in the ebb and flow of humans pushing and being shoved back across borders, shuttled from detention center to filthy campground to open fields and rocky beaches. This is to be my life.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“Vomiting until my insides feel like they’re twisting up and out of my throat like vines.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“If recall and recollect mean to “call” and “collect” again, does refugee contain within it, hidden and folded in a dead language, the notion of perpetual fleeing?”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“That old nan in your building,” she says, over-enunciating every word, “she pointed at your window last night, when she were talking to the police, and she said, ‘The deaf girl saw everything too.’ Can you read lips?” I nod.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“It’s too quiet, but there’s nothing I can do about it. To play music off the laptop would alert her to the fact that I can hear, and that’s not a conversation I’m about to have with anyone. So I sit there, against the wall, and drink the disgusting juice.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“What do they see, the people in the windows, when they look into mine? I try to project myself, release this body and all the things that weigh it down, soar over concrete, and inhabit some space over there. I imagine looking out, seeing through the eyes of another. What is it they see in West Tower, fourth floor, flat three?”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“There is no sound; it feels as if my heart has stilled, ceased trying to pound its way out of my ribs.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“I want to tell him I love the taste of his words, how they feel rolling around the tongue of my mind’s voice, how they slither down my chest and hum into the caverns of my heart, how they sometimes slide further down and pluck between my legs, where I can no longer distinguish pain from pleasure.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“Yeah, I vote. We all vote. All me mates do. But it’s not enough. Voting will only get you so far, especially when it’s a choice between bad and worse. All politicians are gutless crooks. Everyone knows that. The system is corrupt. You can’t play within it. You have to look outside it, wreck it from the outside. Dismantle and topple it.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“I thought I was lucky because, unlike most of my friends, I never had to be home at a particular time. I didn’t want to get home until late because I knew if I got home earlier there would often be a fight in progress or some other event that made me wish I were somewhere else, someone else. Sometimes the thing you want most is just someone to tell you, tell you anything. Because that means you’re important. And sometimes it’s not that you’re not important, it’s just you’re not seen because the pain of those around you makes you invisible.”
― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets ofthe Heart

“The body is full of signs about what’s going on inside us. It’s really amazing. Someone can ask you how you are feeling and you might say, ‘I don’t know,’ because maybe you don’t know or maybe you don’t want to say, but your body always knows how you are feeling. When you are afraid. When you are happy. When you are excited. When you are nervous. When you are angry. When you are jealous. When you are sad. Your mind might think you do not know, but if you ask your body, it will tell you. It has a mind of its own, in a way. It reacts. It responds. Sometimes it reacts the right way in a situation, sometimes the wrong way.”
― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets ofthe Heart

“Sometimes we need to stop thinking about what we should say and just say what it is we need to.”
― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

“ONE THING every human has in common is the first sound we hear. It’s the heartbeat of our mother. That steady rhythm is the first connection each of us knows, not with our minds, but the knowing is there in our hearts. The heart is where we find our comfort and our safety in the darkest of places. It is what binds us together and what breaks when we are apart. The heart has its own kind of magic—love.”
― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets ofthe Heart

“oftentimes those who hurt people are those who hurt the most.”
― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets ofthe Heart

“If you can heal your own wounds, you don’t hurt anymore and you don’t hurt others.”
― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets ofthe Heart

“The thing we have to remember in making duʿā’ is: first of all, we’re not in a position to place orders. Secondly: whatever I’m asking for yā Allāh, if this is good for me, give me and if not, I trust your decision.”
― Nouman Ali Khan, Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

“What is between this Master of ours and us? The thing that ties us together, the thing that gives us a relationship is actually duʿā’, itself.”
― Nouman Ali Khan, Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

“When people are offering you help, that might be from Allah, that might be the answer to your duʿā’.”
― Nouman Ali Khan, Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

“Sūrat al-ʿAṣr is not about attaining success. It’s not a surah that teaches Muslims how to become successful; it actually teaches Muslims how not to become failures.”
― Nouman Ali Khan, Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

“I used to worry about fitting in until I realized the reason I didn't fit in was because I didn't want to.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it. You can’t climb a mountain that you pretend isn’t there.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“I know you may not be able to hear anything now, even if you try, but please don’t give up. I feel sure that one day you will find whatever it is you seek, and that the spark that leads to it will come from hearing some kind of voice. People’s lives never stay the same colour forever. There are times when the colour of life changes completely.”
― Durian Sukegawa, Sweet Bean Paste