Quotes by Egyptian Authors - Page 2

Illiteracy does not impede the practice of democracy, as witnessed by the success of democracy in India despite the high illiteracy rate. One doesn't need a university diploma to realize that the ruler is oppressive and corrupt. On the other hand, to eradicate illiteracy requires that we elect a fair and efficient political regime.
Alaa Al Aswany
I never fell in love with another woman. I cannot have a relationship with a woman if I'm not in love...I'm a very particular person, I'm not very much interested in short adventures with women or girls. I have to fall in love with someone in order to have a realtionship with her.
Omar Sharif
Two words from him, and I had seen my pouting apathy change into I’ll play anything for you till you ask me to stop, till it’s time for lunch, till the skin on my fingers wears off layer after layer, because I like doing things for you, will do anything for you, just say the word...
André Aciman
From Time to Time, Upgrade your list of Gratitude as well as your Bucket list.
Alaa Abd El-Salam
...I have decided that I shan't sweat the small stuff. Sense and sensibility will, I assume, come in their own time. If indeed they ought to come. And in the meantime, I shall continue to work my ass off... and whenever the opportunity arises... dance my ass off. ... As someone very smart once wrote, 'Those who were seen dancing were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music'.
Amy Mowafi
Christians today who view the Bible as God's unadulterated and inerrant word are rightly labeled fundamentalists, while Muslims who think the same of the Qur'an are simply considered Muslims.
Hamed Abdel-Samad
disagreement based on LEGITIMATE IJTIHAD which does not create DISCORD or DISUNITY is a BLESSING for the UMMAH and an enrichment of ISLAMIC JURISPRUDENCE. Objective disagreement in itself poses no threat if it is coupled with TOLERANCE and is free of FANATICISM, ACCUSATIONS, and NARROW-MINDEDNESS.
Yusuf Al-Qaradawi
We can witness collective movements alarmingly influenced by genuine social phobias and affecting the most industrialized and educated societies. Exclusive identities are being asserted, singular affiliations are being stressed, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to recognize the other in the mirror of one´s own quest. Reducing the other to the sole expression of his or her "difference" is one of the stages of dehumanization; and law alone - let alone the right to equality - cannot suffice to remedy the situation. Here comes the time of the new "barbarians".
Tariq Ramadan
It became clear to her that all men, however respectable in appearance and however elevated their position in society, were utter weaklings in front of a beautiful woman. - The Yacoubian Building, p. 42
Alaa Al Aswany
Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.
Naguib Mahfouz
When you have a dream and someone makes promises they keep breaking, it is hard to recover. You lose hope.
Yasmine El Rashidi
They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.
André Aciman
Every work cancels the dark. Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound. Beauty is death's gift to vulgar life so that it can live in beauty.
Edmond Jabès
You have to have a plot too, you know? Because without it, your life is less of a story and more of an empty paper.
Nema Al-Araby
The power of the people is much stronger than the people in power
Wael Ghonim
We loved with every organ but the heart.
André Aciman
Killing people in the name of religion does not make it religious.
Youssef Ziedan
Good and evil has no passport; it speaks in different tongues, wears many skins, and exists everywhere, even in the same person
A.H. Amin
Mubarak was so paranoid that anyone he perceived as competent became a threat to him.
Wael Ghonim
if not try then catch
Ahmad Moawad
The rulers were using ancient knowledge to manipulate the amygdaloidal primal fear. They ruled through fear, preternatural fear created through soft, invisible waves designed to alternate the brain’s almond. They kept the people spellbound
Amira Aly
...faith must recognize the autonomy of reason and its ability to produce a rational, secular ethics. By the same criterion, reason must accept that it is legitimate for the heart, consciousness and faith to believe in an order and ends thar exist prior to its observation, discoveries and hypotheses. Once the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and religion and science, has been accepted, it is therefore futile to debate, and still less to dispute, the hierarchy of first truths or the nature of the authority granted to their methods and their references.
Tariq Ramadan
...I discovered I'm having a girl. And I hae spent a good portion of the last few weeks thinking about the kind f woman I'd like to see her become and the lessons I'd like to impart to her. Somewhere along the line, I decided it doesn't matter to me what type of woman she is, as much as what type of woman she is not. I never ever want her to become the type of woman who, suffocated by a screwed up society, fears herself, her desires, her ambitions, her impulses, her potential power.
Amy Mowafi
He emerged out of the lake, the declining sun drenching him with aureate light, the droplets on his body iridescent in their beams. He walked confidently toward her, almost every inch of his sculptured body exposed in his black swimsuit. Each sharp contour of muscle glistened, each limb unfolded with lithe grace as he approached, his eyes riveted on her. Coral watched spellbound, a yearning surging up within her, eager and expectant. The air around them trembled with infinite anticipation.
Hannah Fielding
The sign of a beautiful person is that they always see beauty in others.
Omar Suleiman
If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! (p. 225)
André Aciman
One would love nonetheless to know how to be a man, how to be a woman before God, in the mirror of one's own conscience, in the looks of those who surround us. One would wish to find the strength to beautify one's thoughts and to purify one's heart. It is everyone's hope and expectation to live in serenity and to plod along in transparency: the palms of the hands patiently directed towards heaven, at the heart of all this modernity.
Tariq Ramadan
The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...
Ramez Naam
The very principle of democracy is founded on the possibility of making alternative choices. There is no longer a need for democracy, since ideology made the idea that "there is no alternative" acceptable. Adherence to a meta-social principle of superior rationality allows for the elimination of the necessity and possibility of choosing. The so-called principle of the rationality of "markets" exactly fills this function in the ideology of obsolescent capitalism. Democratic practice is thus emptied of all content in the way is open to what I have called "low-intensity democracy" - that is, to electoral buffooneries where parades of majorettes take the place of programs, to the society of the spectacle. Delegitimized by these practices, politics is undone, begins to drift and loses its potential power to give meaning and coherence to alternative societal projects.
Samir Amin
Our Lord took on a body like ours and lived as a man in order that those who had refused to recognize Him in His superintendence and capacity of the whole universe might come to recognize from the works He did here below in the body that what dwelled in this body was the Word of God.
Athanasius of Alexandria
I wanted to hear his window open, hear his espadrilles on the balcony, and then the sound of my own window, which was never locked, being pushed open as he'd step into my room after everyone had gone to bed, slip under my covers, undress me without asking, and after making me want him more than I thought I could ever want another living soul, gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to another, work his way into my body, gently and softly, after heeding the words I'd been rehearsing for days now, Please, don't hurt me, which meant, Hurt me all you want.
André Aciman
Having it all is just too much hassle. I'm not every-woman. I'm a working woman. And I'm not entirely sure I see the oint of being as dexterous in the kitchen as I am at my desk. If Mr. Y is perfectly satisfied with pre-packaged sushi every night, then far be it from me to raise his hopes with all sorts of homey behavior. The secret, I have discovered, is to manage expectations. If he doesn't expect it, then he's hardly going to be disappointed to discover he may never again eat a home-cooked meal. Or indeed, ever eat again.
Amy Mowafi
...with a click, my novel would be born; it would come out into the light suddenly transformed from the hypothetical text composed in my imagination into finished, tangible thing with a real and independent existence. The moment of clicking on the print button always gave rise to strange and powerful ambivalence--a combination of self-satisfaction, gloom and anxiety. Self-satisfaction for having finished writing the book. Gloom because taking my leave of the characters has the same effect on me as when a group of friends have to depart. And anxiety, perhaps because I am on the verge of delivering up into other people's hands something that I treasure.
Alaa Al Aswany
The desired Islamic state might be likened to an orchard planted with olive and palm trees that will take a relatively long time to produce fruit.
Yusuf Al-Qaradawi
All her life she'd had little interest in the workings of boys' minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things.
Omar El Akkad
Here’s what's breaking into my imagination and whatever is in there; that you are not afraid you’ve seen, is yours to take.
Omar Gamal Said
She had been wrong to think it wouldn't matter that much to him, yes, he took her for granted, of course he did , but he took her for granted - not like an old coat in the corner of a dark cupboard, as she'd put it to herself , but like the very air that he breathed .
Ahdaf Soueif
If I loved you for no reasons I will hate you for more reasons
Yasser Hakeem
For the Lord touched all parts of creation, and freed and undeceived them all from every deceit.
Athanasius of Alexandria
What led to September 11 is that most decision makers in the White House thought like you. They supported despotic regimes in the Middle East to multiply the profits of oil and arms companies, and armed violence escalated and reached our shores.
Alaa Al Aswany
As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere--ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends--even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.
André Aciman
You make me love books and the words inside them, because they talk about you. I know they do, they tell me that I love you, not as cliché as I write it, but in the warmest, deepest, calmest words I could ever read. I love you, like the books say it. And I'll find a better way to say it one day.
Nema Al-Araby
At times people who are extremely sad become lighthearted for the most trivial reasons, merely to obtain the relief furnished by the exactly opposite condition.
Naguib Mahfouz
oh god i live in sea of shallow people ..i hope someday find who really deeper than every book i read it..
angham
Misogyny has not been completely wiped out anywhere. Rather, it resides on a spectrum, and our best hope for eradicating it globally is for each of us to expose and to fight against local versions of it, in the understanding that by doing so we advance the global struggle.
Mona Eltahawy
I got a call froma cynical young American journalist...You know the sort. He's lived in the Middle East for a little over five minutes so assumes he knows us natives well. I sip at a skinny mocha frappe while he fires off big important questions about 'the political landscape' and 'Islamic thought'. I stare at him blankly.
Amy Mowafi
So. Tell me. What do you think? Which is better? To take action and perhaps make a fatal mistake - or to take no action and die slowly anyway?
Ahdaf Soueif
Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)
André Aciman
Death wasn't a movie where the pretty star faded away with a touch of pale makeup and every hair in place.
Soheir Khashoggi
But time does not disclose its secrets to humankind, and the possible turned impossible.
Radwa Ashour
And yet, about two weeks after his arrival, all I wanted every night was for him to leave his room, not via its front door, but through the French windows on our balcony. I wanted to hear his window open, hear his espadrilles on the balcony, and then the sound of my own window, which was never locked, being pushed open as he’d step into my room after everyone had gone to bed, slip under my covers, undress me without asking, and after making me want him more than I thought I could ever want another living soul, gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to another, work his way into my body, gently and softly, after heeding the words I’d been rehearsing for days now, Please, don’t hurt me, which meant, Hurt me all you want.
André Aciman
I want a world where hearts are not deceived and do not deceive others.
Naguib Mahfouz
I want a world where men live free from fear and coercion.
Naguib Mahfouz
The possibility of truth has become a delusion to those who made their own disguise the truth.
Nema Al-Araby
I think everyone is wounded in their sex,” I said. “I can’t think of one person who isn’t.
André Aciman
People are naturally born as Libertarians till governments and oppressive societies force them to adopt their ideologies and their ways.
Hany Ghoraba
When the line between right and wrong slowly dims, all that’s wrong will be divinely delicious, and ruthlessly fought for!
Menna Anwar
Differences don’t necessarily mean conflict, diversity is beautiful!
Sahar El-Nadi
Please don't question the insane glaresJust give me today,And tomorrow,Tomorrowwe will matter.
Nema Al-Araby
A deeper thought on the surface is exactly the paradox we need.
Nema Al-Araby