Eman D > Eman's Quotes

“two people who were once very close can
without blame
or grand betrayal
become strangers.
perhaps this is the saddest thing in the world.”
― Warsan Shire

“What you desire is what you want, what you have is what Allah wants.”
― Nouman Ali Khan

“Some of the toughest ayaat in the Quran have Allah's name "ar-Rahman" in them to make it clear that just because Allah is the Most Merciful, it doesn't mean He's not going to carry out justice.”
― Nouman Ali Khan

“How many times have you seen Muslims quote an ayah of the Quran and their eyes were full of anger? Let me tell you, that is not how Angel Jibril brought the Quran to Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and that's not how our Prophet recited the Quran to his people.”
― Nouman Ali Khan

“What does it mean to sell the ayaat of Allah for a small price?
It is to change the meaning of ayaat in order to please people. By telling people whatever they need to be told in order for them to stay pleased with you. That is called selling the ayaat of Allah for a small price.”
― Nouman Ali Khan

“There are no real start-overs, only start-from-heres.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to.”
― Robin McKinley, Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast

“What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her "beauty" his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“How seamless seemed love and then came trouble!”
― Hafez

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.”
― Khalil Gibran

“Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live, and she was always thinking that, in the future, she might regret the choices she made now. “I’m afraid of committing myself,” she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pan, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes not to see the bad things in life.”
― Paulo Coelho, Brida

“Just Friends

I know that I don't own you,
and perhaps I never will,
so anger when you're with her,
I have no right to feel

I know that you don't owe me,
and I should ask for more;
I shouldn't feel so let down,
all the times when you don't call

What I feel—I should show you,
so when you're around I won't;
I knwo I've no right to feel it
but it doesn't mean I don't.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“My mother taught me this trick: if you repeat something over and over again it loses its meaning, for example homework homework homework homework homework homework homework homework homework, see? Nothing. Our existence she said is the same way. You watch the sunset too often it just becomes 6 pm you make the same mistake over and over you stop calling it a mistake. If you just wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up one day you’ll forget why.”
― Phil Kaye

“My soul, you would never mourn a bird that was released from its cage and now roams freely in the heavens. So, too, should you contain your mourning for your beloved one now that he is free.”
― Asmaa Hussein, A Temporary Gift: Reflections on Love, Loss and Healing

“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“One of Allah's names is al-Wahhab, which means the Bestower of Gifts. He gives us gifts for different reasons. He may give a gift solely out of love for His slave. He may see that His slave is distant from Him so He gives her a beautiful gift to bring her back to thanking Him.”
― Asmaa Hussein, A Temporary Gift: Reflections on Love, Loss and Healing

“We seem normal only to those who don't know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on an early dinner date would be; "And how are you crazy?"
The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don't care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.
We make mistakes, too, because are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal state of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.
Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.
The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn't exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently - the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the "not overly wrong" person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.
Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not "normal." We should learn to accommodate ourselves to "wrongness", striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and our partners.”
― Alain de Botton

“I hope you won't take this the wrong way . . ." is another bell ringer for me.

I sense the mealymouthed attacker approaching so if I cannot flee, I explain in no uncertain voice if there is even the slightest chance that I might take a statement the wrong way, be assured that I will do so. I advise the speaker that it would be better to remain silent than to try to collect the speaker's bruised feelings, which I intend to leave in pieces scattered on the floor.

I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves to be ready and able to come to our own self-defense.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice. You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“Talk about corporate greed and everything is really crucially beside the point, in my view, and really should be recognized as a very big regression from what working people, and a lot of others, understood very well a century ago.

Talk about corporate greed is nonsense. Corporations are greedy by their nature. They’re nothing else – they are instruments for interfering with markets to maximize profit, and wealth and market control. You can’t make them more or less greedy; I mean maybe you can sort of force them, but it’s like taking a totalitarian state and saying “Be less brutal!” Well yeah, maybe you can get a totalitarian state to be less brutal, but that’s not the point – the point is not to get a tyranny to be less brutal, but to get rid of it.

Now 150 years ago, that was understood. If you read the labour press – there was a very lively labour press, right around here [Massachusetts] ; Lowell and Lawrence and places like that, around the mid nineteenth century, run by artisans and what they called factory girls; young women from the farms who were working there – they weren’t asking the autocracy to be less brutal, they were saying get rid of it.

And in fact that makes perfect sense; these are human institutions, there’s nothing graven in stone about them. They [corporations] were created early in this century with their present powers, they come from the same intellectual roots as the other modern forms of totalitarianism – namely Stalinism and Fascism – and they have no more legitimacy than they do.

I mean yeah, let’s try and make the autocracy less brutal if that’s the short term possibility – but we should have the sophistication of, say, factory girls in Lowell 150 years ago and recognize that this is just degrading and intolerable and that, as they put it “those who work in the mills should own them ” And on to everything else, and that’s democracy – if you don’t have that, you don’t have democracy.”
― Noam Chomsky, Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World

“The wars will end and the leaders will shake hands, and that old woman will remain waiting for her martyred son, and that girl will wait for her beloved husband, and the children will wait for their heroic father, I do not know who sold the homeland but I know who paid the price.”
― Mahmoud Darwish