Maher Battuti

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“إنى أؤمن بأبولون ...أؤمن بأبولون إله الفن الذى عفرتُ جبينى أعواما فى تراب هيكله ... إنه يعلم كم جاهدتُ من أجله وكم كافحت وناضلت وكددت ! باسمه أخوض المعركة الكبرى وأنازل كل مجتمع وكل حياة وكل عقبة تحول بينى وبين فنى الذى منحته زهرة أيامى التى لن تعود ...”
― توفيق الحكيم, زهرة العمر

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“When, as my friend suggested, I stand before Zeus (whether I die naturally, or under sentence of History)I will repeat all this that I have written as my defense.Many people spend their entire lives collecting stamps or old coins, or growing tulips. I am sure that Zius will be merciful toward people who have given themselves entirely to these hobbies, even though they are only amusing and pointless diversions. I shall say to him : "It is not my fault that you made me a poet, and that you gave me the gift of seeing simultaneously what was happening in Omaha and Prague, in the Baltic states and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.I felt that if I did not use that gift my poetry would be tasteless to me and fame detestable. Forgive me." And perhaps Zeus, who does not call stamp-collectors and tulip-growers silly, will forgive.”
― Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind