Nada > Nada's Quotes

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“في انتظارِكِ، لا أستطيعُ انتظارَكِ
لا أَستطيعُ قراءةَ دوستويفسكي
ولا الاستماعَ إلي أُمِّ كلثوم أَو ماريّا كالاس
وغيرهما
في انتظارك تمشي العقاربُ في ساعةِ اليد نحو اليسار
إلي زَمَنٍ لا مكانَ لَهُ
في انتظارك لم أنتظرك، انتظرتُ الأزَلْ”
― محمود درويش, حالة حصار

“أحن إلى خبز أمي
وقهوة أمي ..
ولمسة أمي ..
وتكبُر في الطفولة
يوماً على صدر يوم
وأعشق عمري لأني
إذا مت،
أخجل من دمع أمي!”
― محمود درويش

“إن البقاء في الوطن أفضل! 
هنا على الأقل يستطيع المرء أن يتهم الآخرين بكل شيء وأن يبريء بذلك نفسه ! ”
― دوستويفسكي

“وقد بلغتُ من شدّة عدم اكتراثي أن تمنيتُ في النهاية أن أقبض على دقيقة واحدة أحسُ فيها أن شيئاً ما يستحقُ الاهتمام.”
― فيودور دوستويفسكي, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“وتذكرت أن الله لا يحب الصفقات أبدًا ...”
― دوستويفسكي, Poor Folk

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Be a full person. Motherhood is a glorious gift, but do not define yourself solely by motherhood. Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“She sighed. 'But it's not that simple, you know, really it isn't. It's not really him, you know. I mean not really the person. It's everything, it's everywhere. So where do you break out to? You're just one person and it's everywhere. So where do you break out to? I don't know, Tambu, really I don't know. So what do you do? I don't know.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

“It is our diffidence about the afterlife that leads us to religion”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“Mais le pire, quand on habite une prison sans barreaux, c'est qu'on n'a pas même conscience des écrans qui bouchent l'horizon; j'errais à travers un épais brouillard, et je le croyais transparent. Les choses qui m'échappaient, je n'en entrevoyais même pas la présence.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“Marriage is lovely when it works, but if it does not, should one condemn oneself ? I stopped feeling guilty for being me.”
― Buchi Emecheta

“But who made the law that we should not hope in our daughters? We women subscribe to that law more than anyone. Until we change this, it is still a man's world, which women will always help to build.”
― Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood

“Typical Igbo psychology; men never do wrong, only the women; they have to beg for forgiveness, because they are bought, paid for and must remain like that, silent, obedient slaves.”
― Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen

“Every woman should be free to live the life she chooses.”
― Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood

“An uneducated person has little chance of happiness. He cannot enjoy reading, he cannot understand any complicated music, he does not know what to do with himself if he has no job. How many times have I heard my friends say, ' I want to leave my boring job because I want to write, because I want to catch up with goings on in the theatre, because I want to travel and because I want to be with my family. '
The uneducated man has no such choices. Once he has lost his boring job, he feels he's lost his life. That is unfair.”
― Buchi Emecheta, Head Above Water