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Quote by Leslie Cockburn

“She had done her residency at LA County Hospital, where the CT machines were so old she had to mark off the body parts for scanning with paper clips. She thought Baghdad hospitals might be like that.”

Quote by Leslie Cockburn

Book:Baghdad Solitaire
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Work

Baghdad Solitaire

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Author

Leslie Cockburn
Leslie Cockburn

Leslie Cockburn is an American writer renowned for her investigative journalism and exposé books. Born on September 2, 1952, she has had a career that spans a wide range of issues, including the environment, politics, and social justice. more

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“في السودان صراع حضارات و أديان, صراع سيطرة على الموارد الوفيرة في هذه البلاد الطيبة, متاريس مرتجلة على الأرصفة, حواجز مضادة للدبابات, أبراج مراقبة عالية تلامس السماء, فئة تحتمي بالقديسين و الأخرى بالأنبياء, غافلين عن أن الجميع خلقهم إله واحد.”

True Facts
Book:ذبائح ملوّنة
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“I taught an introductory creative writing class at Princeton last year and, in addition to the classic ‘show don’t tell’, I often told my students that their fiction needed to have ’emotional truth’ […]: a quality different from honesty and more resilient than fact, a quality that existed not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind of fiction that shows. All the novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have this empathetic human quality. And because I write the kind of fiction I like to read, when I started Half of a Yellow Sun […], I hoped that emotional truth would be its major recognizable trait. […] Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’. Yet, […] to write realistic fiction about war, especially one central to the history of one’s own country, is to be constantly aware of a responsibility to something larger than art. While writing Half of a Yellow Sun, I enjoyed playing with minor things [such as inventing a train station in a town that has none]. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time. I could not let a character be changed by anything that had not actually happened. If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally keen to be true to the spirit of the time as well as to artistic vision of it. The writing itself was a bruising experience. […] But there were also moments of extravagant joy when I recognized, in a character or moment or scene, that quality of emotional truth.” In the Shadow of Biafra (essay included in the 2007 Harper Perennial edition of Half of a Yellow Sun).”

WritingFictionHistoryHistorical FictionArtistic VisionEmotional TruthTrue FactsVerifiability
Author:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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“Feelings aren’t facts,” I offer. “True. But feelings are a result of something. Even the ones that seem to come out of nowhere have an origin. They hint at truth or issues. Even if they aren’t reliable on their own, you can trace them back to facts. Sometimes the fact is unreliable like a hormone imbalance or trauma trigger. Sometimes the fact is subconscious intuition.”

FeelingsSubconsciousTrue Facts
Book:Falling in Love with My Vampire Cat
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“It’s extremely unlikely you will be magically transformed from a mediocre or average people manager to a Satya Nadella or a Ratan Tata. You will often revert to type and repeat your bad behaviors. But if you become aware of this retrogressive behavior and can reduce the frequency and severity of this you can change over time, not overnight.”

ProgressTransformationSelf AwarenessLong TermBehaviourDirectionRegressionLeadershipship
Book:Let's Get Real: 42 Tips for the Stuck Manager
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