theliteraturefreak

Words and agony

[theliteraturefreak]

My apology had become, by then, an extension of myself. It was my Hello.

Ocean Vuong | On earth we're briefly gorgeous

[theliteraturefreak]

There was a door, I could not touch the handle.Why could I not walk out of my prison? What is hell? Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it. Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

T.S Eliot | The Cocktail Party

[theliteraturefreak]

I could not touch the handle.Why could I not walk out of my prison?What is hell? Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it. Merely projections. There is nothing to escape fromAnd nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

T.S Eliot | The Cocktail Party

[theliteraturefreak]

At times, she wonders if this tenderness, the enduring sweetness of heartache, is all she will ever have...

Mirza Waheed - The Book of Gold Leaves

[theliteraturefreak]

There are a thousand quiet heartbreaks amid the loud ones that we hear about, she sometimes thinks. Some carry on, quietly, over a lifetime.

Mirza Waheed | The book of gold leaves

[theliteraturefreak]

He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall.

James Joyce| A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

[theliteraturefreak]

I want to sleep dreamlessly. I want to rest in peace. Just that. I don't want to know what this world is or whether something like it exists. That is why I sleep as much as I can. I don't want to know about life or death nor whether I exist or not. I wouldn't want to know what peace is.

Shahnaz Bashir - Half Mother

[theliteraturefreak]

But this longing is a pain. An eternal torture. It has not abated for a second. It kills us every day and resurrects us every morning to kill us again. Please feel for us.

Shahnaz Bashir | Half Mother

[theliteraturefreak]

In a way, this longing, this pain of waiting, was like preparing for hope. This pain of expecting was an education too, an exposure to what life held and meant.

Shahnaz Bashir - Half Mother

[theliteraturefreak]

She hated having to believe she existed, to feel she was conscious. She hated the smell that sleep brought. She wished she were dead.

| Shahnaz Bashir - Half Mother

[theliteraturefreak]

His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys, and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.

-James Joyce| A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

[theliteraturefreak]

He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed.

-James Joyce | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

[theliteraturefreak]

...he wondered why he bore no malice now to those who had tormented him. He had not forgotten a whit of their cowardice and cruelty but the memory of it called forth no anger from him. All the descriptions of fierce love and hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal.

-James Joyce | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

[theliteraturefreak]

Muslim world has today so little energy left that it does not offer sufficient resistance. The remnants of its cultural existence are being levelled to the ground under the pressure of Western ideas and customs. A note of resignation is perceivable; and resignation, in the life of nations and cultures, means death.

Muhammad Asad | Islam at the Crossroads

[theliteraturefreak]

To imitate Western civilization in its spirit, its mode of life and its social organization is impossible without dealing a fatal blow to the very existence of Islam as an ideological proposition.

Muhammad Asad | Islam at the crossroads

[theliteraturefreak]

Western civilisation is based on the attempt to evade any role of ethical development in the material progress of the world. Therefore the very bases of the western civilisation are antagonistic to the entirely ethics based doctrine of Islam. Any attempt of an Islamic civilization to accept the western ideology of progress will result in the degeneration of islam itself.

[theliteraturefreak]

To imitate Western civilization in its spirit, its mode of life and its social organization is impossible without dealing a fatal blow to the very existence of Islam as an ideological proposition.

Muhammad Asad | Islam at the crossroads

[theliteraturefreak]

In Islam, the first and foremost objective is the moral progress of the human being: and, therefore, ethical considerations overrule the purely utilitarian ones. In modern Western civilization, the position is exactly reversed. Considerations of material utility dominate all manifestations of human activity, and ethics is being relegated to an obscure background and condemned to a merely theoretical existence without the slightest power to influence the community.

Muhammad Asad | Islam at the Crossroads