“Light a candle for me, I used to whisper to no one.
Someone
Anyone
If you're out there
Please tell me you can feel this fire.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“She put my hand in the fire once. Jus to see if it would burn, she said. Just to check if it was a regular hand, she said. I was 6 years old then. I remember because it was my birthday.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“I don't consider myself a moral man. I do not philosophize about life or bother with laws and principles that govern most people. I do not pretend to know the difference between right and wrong. But I do live by a certain kind of code. And somethimes, I think, you have how to shoot first.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“I fold myself into a corner of this room and bury my head in my knees and rock back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and I wish and I wish and I wish and I dream of impossible things until I've cried myself to sleep.
I wonder what it would be like to have a friend.
And then I wonder who else is locked in this asylum. I wonder where the other screams are coming from.
I wonder if they're coming from me.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“On the bleakst days you have to keep your eyes onward and upward and on the saddest days you have to leave them open to let them cry. To then let them dry. To give theam a chance to wash out the pain in order to see fresh and clear once again. (p. 193)”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“I've learned to stare at things. The walls. My hands. The cracks in the walls. The lines on my fingers. The shades of gray in the concrete. The shape of my fingernails. I pick one thing and stare at it for what must be hours. I keep time in my head by counting the seconds as they pass. I keep days in my head by writing them down. Today is day two. Today is the second day. Today is a day.
Today.
It's so cold. It's so cold. It's so cold.
Please please please
I started screaming today.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“Because these words I write down are the only proof I have that I'm still alive”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“No one wants a dandelion.
They crop up all over the place, ugly and unfortunate, an average blossom in a world desperatly seeking beauty. They're weeds, people say. They're uninteresting and offer no fragrance and there are too many of them, too much of them, we don't want them, destroy them.
Dandelions are a nuisance,
We desire the buttercups, the daffodils, the morning glories. We want the azalea, the poinsettia, the calla lily. We pluck them from our gradens and plant them in our homes and we don't seem to remember their toxic nature.
We don't seem to care that
if you get too close?
if you take a small bite?
The beauty is replaced wit pain and laced with a posion that laughs in your blood, destroys your organs, infevts your heart.
But pick a dandelion.
Pick a dandelion and make a salad, eat the leaves, the flower, the stem. Thread it in your hair, plant it in the ground and watch it thrive.
Pick a dandelion and close your eyes
make a wish
blow it into the wind.
Watch it
change
the
world.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“I’ve never read anything like this before. I’ve never read anything that could speak directly to my bones.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“This doesn’t happen. People aren’t forgotten like this. Not abandoned like this.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“He was their father, her husband, and the reason they all died a brutal, untimely death. And some days i wonder why I insist on keeping myself alive.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“Because i never really know, i still can’t tell the difference, I’m never quite certain whether or not i’m actually alive.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“Faith must precede all effort to understand. Reflection upon revealed truth naturally follows the advent of faith, but faith comes first to the hearing ear, not to the cogitating mind.”
― A.W. Tozer, quote from The Knowledge of the Holy
“Imagine that light is shining out from a flashlight. According to common sense, if we run fast enough we could in principle catch up with the front of the beam of light as it advances forward. Common sense might even suggest that we could jog alongside the front of the beam if we managed to run at the speed of light. But if we are to follow Maxwell’s equations to the letter, then no matter how fast we run, the beam still recedes away from us at a speed of 299,792,458 meters per second.”
― Brian Cox, quote from Why Does E=mc²? (And Why Should We Care?)
“...every time you make a decision to be less than what God wants for you, you're denying yourself some of God's blessings. It's up to you. You can live a life with God's blessings, or just exist with all the consequences of choosing wrong.”
― Terri Blackstock, quote from Last Light
“If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious. -- David Foster Wallace”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
“wouldn't you like to make sure all those millions you give to Uncle Sam went to schools and hospitals instead of nuclear warheads?'
As a matter of fact, he would. Playgrounds for big kids, preschool programs to little ones, and mandatory LASIK surgery for NFL refs.”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, quote from Natural Born Charmer
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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