Suzanne > Suzanne's Quotes

“لا حُب أفضل من حُبٍ بدون حبيب,
ليس أصلح من عمل صالح دون غاية.”
― جلال الدين الرومي

“You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“I look for the words, Professor. I look for the words because I believe that the words is the way to your heart.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“Maybe you could just keep that in reserve. Maybe just take a shot at startin over. I dont mean start again. Everybody’s done that. Over means over. It means you walk away. I mean, if everthing you are and everthing you have and everthing you have done has brought you at last to the bottom of a whiskey bottle or bought you a one way ticket on the Sunset Limited then you cant give me the first reason on God’s earth for salvagin none of it. Cause they aint no reason. And I’m goin to tell you that if you can bring yourself to shut the door on all of that it will be cold and it will be lonely and they’ll be a mean wind blowin. And them is all good signs. You dont say nothin. You just turn up your collar and keep walkin.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“...وعدتك أن لا أحبك..

ثم أمام القرار الكبير، جبنت

وعدتك أن لا أعود...

وعدت...

وأن لا أموت اشتياقاً

ومت

وعدت مراراً

وقررت أن أستقيل مراراً

ولا أتذكر أني استقلت...

2

وعدت بأشياء أكبر مني..

فماذا غداً ستقول الجرائد عني؟

أكيدٌ.. ستكتب أني جننت..

أكيدٌ.. ستكتب أني انتحرت

وعدتك..

أن لا أكون ضعيفاً... وكنت..

وأن لا أقول بعينيك شعراً..

وقلت...

وعدت بأن لا ...

وأن لا..

وأن لا ...

وحين اكتشفت غبائي.. ضحكت...

3

وعدتك..

أن لا أبالي بشعرك حين يمر أمامي

وحين تدفق كالليل فوق الرصيف..

صرخت..

وعدتك..

أن أتجاهل عينيك ، مهما دعاني الحنين

وحين رأيتهما تمطران نجوماً...

شهقت...

وعدتك..

أن لا أوجه أي رسالة حبٍ إليك..

ولكنني – رغم أنفي – كتبت

وعدتك..

أن لا أكون بأي مكانٍ تكونين فيه..

وحين عرفت بأنك مدعوةٌ للعشاء..

ذهبت..

وعدتك أن لا أحبك..

كيف؟

وأين؟

وفي أي يومٍ تراني وعدت؟

لقد كنت أكذب من شدة الصدق،

والحمد لله أني كذبت....

4

وعدت..

بكل برودٍ.. وكل غباء

بإحراق كل الجسور ورائي

وقررت بالسر، قتل جميع النساء

وأعلنت حربي عليك.

وحين رفعت السلاح على ناهديك

انهزمت..

وحين رأيت يديك المسالمتين..

اختلجت..

وعدت بأن لا .. وأن لا .. وأن لا ..

وكانت جميع وعودي

دخاناً ، وبعثرته في الهواء.

5

وغدتك..

أن لا أتلفن ليلاً إليك

وأن لا أفكر فيك، إذا تمرضين

وأن لا أخاف عليك

وأن لا أقدم ورداً...

وأن لا أبوس يديك..

وتلفنت ليلاً.. على الرغم مني..

وأرسلت ورداً.. على الرغم مني..

وبستك من بين عينيك، حتى شبعت

وعدت بأن لا.. وأن لا .. وأن لا..

وحين اكتشفت غبائي ضحكت...

6

وعدت...

بذبحك خمسين مره..

وحين رأيت الدماء تغطي ثيابي

تأكدت أني الذي قد ذبحت..

فلا تأخذيني على محمل الجد..

مهما غضبت.. ومهما انفعلت..

ومهما اشتعلت.. ومهما انطفأت..

لقد كنت أكذب من شدة الصدق

والحمد لله أني كذبت...

7

وعدتك.. أن أحسم الأمر فوراً..

وحين رأيت الدموع تهرهر من مقلتيك..

ارتبكت..

وحين رأيت الحقائب في الأرض،

أدركت أنك لا تقتلين بهذي السهوله

فأنت البلاد .. وأنت القبيله..

وأنت القصيدة قبل التكون،

أنت الدفاتر.. أنت المشاوير.. أنت الطفوله..

وأنت نشيد الأناشيد..

أنت المزامير..

أنت المضيئة..

أنت الرسوله...

8

وعدت..

بإلغاء عينيك من دفتر الذكريات

ولم أك أعلم أني سألغي حياتي

ولم أك أعلم أنك..

- رغم الخلاف الصغير – أنا..

وأني أنت..

وعدتك أن لا أحبك...

- يا للحماقة -

ماذا بنفسي فعلت؟

لقد كنت أكذب من شدة الصدق،

والحمد لله أني كذبت...

9

وعدتك..

أن لا أكون هنا بعد خمس دقائق..

ولكن.. إلى أين أذه”
― نزار قباني

“Oh, pride, pride. I was so wrong. It defeated me. It simply proved insurmountable. There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean, there's the weather, there's the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there's space, there's history. There's this thread or something caught between my teeth, there's the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill? And, of course, there's time. And place. And there's you, Mrs. D. I wanted to tell part of the story of part of you. Oh, I'd love to have done that."

"Richard. You wrote a whole book."

"But everything's left out of it, almost everything. And then I just stuck on a shock ending. Oh, now, I'm not looking for sympathy, really. We want so much, don't we?"

"Yes. I suppose we do."

"You kissed me beside a pond."

"Ten thousand years ago."

"It's still happening.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.”
― Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
― Michael Cunningham

“The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.”
― Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

“How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.

Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Years

“But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Years

“Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.”
― Charles Bukowski

“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
― T.S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot Reading: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Others

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”
― John Lennon

“Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“Throgh me men gon into that blysful place
Of hertes hele and dedly woundes cure;
Thorgh me men gon unto the welle of grace,
There grene and lusty May shal evere endure.
This is the wey to al good aventure.
Be glad, thow redere, and thy sorwe of-caste;
Al open am I - passe in, and sped thee faste!'

'Thorgh me men gon,' than spak that other side,
'Unto the mortal strokes of the spere
Of which Disdayn and Daunger is the gyde,
There nevere tre shal fruyt ne leves bere.
This strem yow ledeth to the sorweful were
There as the fish in prisoun is al drye;
The'eschewing is only the remedye!”
― Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Birds

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
And the browns gone gray
And yellow
A terrible amber.
In the cold streets
Your warm body.
In whatever room
Your warm body.
Among all the people
Your absence
The people who are always
Not you.


I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.”
― Jack Gilbert

“Failing and Flying"

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems