World Literature Quotes

“Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength
and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth
to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable
for the catastrophes rearranging their lives.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“Dreams, always dreams! and the more ambitious and delicate is the soul, the more its dreams bear it away from possibility. Each man carries in himself his dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed. From birth to death, how many hours can we count that are filled by positive enjoyment, by successful and decisive action? Shall we ever live, shall we ever pass into this picture which my soul has painted, this picture which resembles you?

These treasures, this furniture, this luxury, this order, these perfumes, these miraculous flowers, they are you. Still you, these mighty rivers and these calm canals! These enormous ships that ride upon them, freighted with wealth, whence rise the monotonous songs of their handling: these are my thoughts that sleep or that roll upon your breast. You lead them softly towards that sea which is the Infinite; ever reflecting the depths of heaven in the limpidity of your fair soul; and when, tired by the ocean's swell and gorged with the treasures of the East, they return to their port of departure, these are still my thoughts enriched which return from the Infinite - towards you.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Aleister Crowley

“What bizarre things does not one find in a great city when one knows how to walk about and how to look! Life swarms with innocent monsters. Oh Lord my God, Thou Creator, Thou Master, Thou who hast made law and liberty, Thou the Sovereign who dost allow, Thou the Judge who dost pardon, Thou who art full of Motives and of Causes, Thou who hast (it may be) placed within my soul the love of horror in order to turn my hear to Thee, like the cure which follows the knife; Oh Lord, have pity, have pity upon the mad men and women that we are! Oh Creator, is it possible that monsters should exist in the eyes of Him alone who knoweth why they exist, how they have made themselves, and how they would have made themselves, and could not?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Aleister Crowley

“The whole purpose of the construction of The Bridge of Silver Wings was to provide a path leading to The River of Winged Dreams, or to serve as a resting place until the river’s deeper and truer nature revealed itself.”
― Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams

“…The time machine quietly disintegrated with leprosy of unsaid hurts and accusations that peeled back skin, muscle, and bone, snapping off love’s digits, fingers, arms, and legs in agonizing screams …”
― Michal Majernik, Mechanical Bull

“Miró hacia la biblioteca. Aquella sabiduría no calmaría nunca su fuego; siglos y siglos de palabras no podían satisfacer aquel deseo imperativo e irracional.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

“Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don’t understand either.”
― Aminatta Forna

“In general, Mark was right; love was a business predestined for failure. I should have poked my head out of the sand in time and asked whether my husband loved me or not.”
― Tatiana Vedenska, Why

“The obsession with past trauma refracts World Lit’s sense of belatedness, even when the genre advertises its contemporaneity. You can argue that we’re still haunted by Hiroshima or the Holocaust, that people refuse to speak about this haunting — kind of the way they refuse to care about the novel. Past horrors, unlike contemporary ones, also tend to be events liberal readers agree about. But they displace the contemporary world, locating politics always elsewhere, in some distant geography and irrecoverable past. Present day confusions and controversies are neglected or sentimentalized.”
― The editors n+1

“Great works of literature from other places are not only censored by banning them, but even more so by silencing them, by refusing to translate them in the first place. Marginalization is the worst form of censorship and intellectual assassination. Likewise, choosing what gets translated into a certain language and what gets marginalized is a form of shaping and constructing the historical memory of a place according to whims of those who own the money and means of knowledge production.”
― Louis Yako

“The Vase

The bouquet of flowers in the vase is two weeks old,

Or maybe a little older?

They are all wilted and dead now.

The scene is much like a mass grave,

Each flower has died in its own way.

The first flower—the biggest in the bunch—

Opened as widely as it could.

Each of its petals dried up.

The second one seemed as though it had tried

To bend itself towards the end of her life,

It broke her neck as she dried in silence.

The third flower tried to close after opening,

As she felt her life was coming to an end.

She died closed.

The fourth flower looked like she had started to sacrifice herself

For the sake of everyone else around her.

She, too, dropped most of her petals,

And died naked, except for one or two petals.

The fifth flower didn’t have time to open,

Or perhaps she realized the futility of opening up in such a tight vase.

She also wilted and dried prematurely and half-opened.

The sixth flower died very young,

Before having a chance to bloom.

The colorless water in the vase is now yellowish and dead.

Yes, waters die too.

For colorless waters, death can be colorful.

April 12, 2013”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“The Eternal Friends

The three eternal friends, Time, Loneliness and Death, met at a small old café.

'You won’t last long. I will destroy you at the end,' said Time to Loneliness.

'And I will drain every minute and every second in your life.

Nothing will give you joy no matter what you do or how hard you try,' Loneliness responded.

After a short silence, once Death pronounced its sentence, Loneliness vanished and Time passed.

June 20, 2013”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“The Cats in the City

Location: an Arab city.

Time: the age of defeat. The twenty-first century.

General atmosphere: “fancy” neighborhoods.

Expensive houses painted in tombstone colors.

Beautiful and well-maintained gardens.

Flowers that no one dares to smell.

Imported cars.

Imported devices.

Imported clothes.

Imported foods.

Endless consumer shops for anything and everything.

Between every other restaurant,

there are shops selling cosmetics and souvenirs.

Between every other consumer market,

There is a worship place.

All consumer shops are built skillfully

On the scab of the same old wound;

A wound that can flood the city with blood and death

With the slightest fingernail scratch.

As I walk farther from the city,

The consumer shops vanish.

The lights are suddenly dimmed.

The cheering and the hustle and bustle of the consumers go silent.

I see myself in total darkness.

I am alone hearing nothing but the sounds of my footsteps,

And the meows of hungry stray street cats,

Covered with the ashes of daily existence.

A thin and hungry cat approaches me,

She meows in despair and starvation,

Begging me for her bite of the day (or the week?)

I throw her a small piece of my sandwich.

She picks it up and runs away

To celebrate her temporary gains!

She leaves me alone wondering in darkness:

What reflects the reality of this city more

The 'fancy' neighborhoods I saw earlier,

Or the starving cats in the darkness?

June 8, 2014”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“The Problem

The problem I have, my friends, is too complicated.

It is not only that I no longer have a home,

Or a roof over my head.

It is that I no longer wish to have one.

I confess to you; however, that

Even if I wished to have a place to call home,

My wish would be impossible to realize,

Because I have been erased from everywhere.

Yes, the mercenaries

And those who worship the dollar notes,

Under the names of religions and ideologies,

Have erased me from history.

They have revised and rewrote my story.

Everywhere I go,

I find them lurking and waiting for me,

To blockade me,

To suffocate me,

And to steal from my mouth

The few crumbs of bread I have left.

And so, I repeat, my friends,

My problem is too complicated.

I don’t have a home,

I no longer want a home,

And I couldn’t have a home to shelter me,

Even if so I wished in my wild dreams.

June 1, 2017”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“Exhaustion

Salima sat in the fancy hotel room

In the evening time.

Here she is again in another foreign city,

Attending a conference discussing “human rights”.

Her eyes roamed the room.

She suddenly felt a severe chill in her body.

She suddenly realized that she is exhausted,

But her exhaustion is not that of one day,

It was one of a lifetime!

It fell upon her abruptly.

The thoughts of the bygone years

Nested in her head,

Were suddenly awoken.

One thought after another.

She realized at that moment

That she is tired of responding to

The same absurd questions

About her origins

Her ethnicity,

Her religion,

Her hobbies,

Her favorite foods,

Her education background,

Her age,

And her occupation.

Questions asked frequently by people who don’t care.

She suddenly realized

That throughout her life,

She never found a friend who could really understand.

The evening was about to draw its dark curtains.

She remembered that ever since she was a child,

She had been hiding her favorite words and writings

In notebooks that nobody will read.

She has been murmuring her favorite tunes,

In places where nobody could hear her.

The evening was about to draw its dark curtains.

She realized that her true thoughts and feelings

Lived nowhere expect inside of her head,

And there they will most likely die.

Her head had become like a prison for her thoughts.

The evening was about to draw its dark curtains.

She suddenly realized

That she had wasted so many years of her life

Looking for someone who might understand.

And each time she thought she had found one,

She found herself in yet another prison.

She looked through the window of the fancy hotel room

And saw that the darkness had covered the entire city.

September 9, 2017”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“(Sorrow in the Heart of an Apple)
I clean up my old sorrow
Wrapped it in a clean and scented piece of cloth
Buried it under an apple tree
in our apple orchard in the village.
Seasons passed…
It seemed to me that everything was over
When the harvest season came again.
I forgot that I had wanted to forget about my sorrow
I forgot where I had buried it, too.
I picked an attractive red apple
That looked glorious and delicious.
From the first bite,
I immediately recognized
The taste of that same age-old sorrow.
I realized then that my buried sorrow
Had multiplied.
And here I am
Face to face with it again:
Here I am finding it
In the heart of every single apple!”
― Louis Yako

“If the spirits themselves were not afraid, how come they only move about at night?
- Imminent River”
― Anaele Ihuoma, Imminent River