Balkis Ben Chaaben

“There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“Nostalgia is an illness
for those who haven't realized
that today
is tomorrow's nostalgia.”
― Zeena Schreck

“I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I took only one suitcase, and a cosmetics case for medicines but I was worried about books. Solitude is all right with books, awful without.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Travels with Myself and Another