“It is not Atlas who carries the world on his shoulders, but woman; and sometimes she plays with it as with a ball.”
“تبتسمينَ كامرأة
وتضحكينَ كطفلة
تُقبِلينَ كطيف
وتَذهبينَ كالحقيقة
تتحدثينَ كجدول
وتعانقينَ كعاصفة
تندفعينَ كمُهرة
وتهدأين كذكرى !!”
Source: عودة الياسمين إلى أهله سالماً
“Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention.”
“She wasn’t a bird in a cage. A bird in a cage, when the cage is opened, can still fly away. She was a bird embroidered onto a screen — a white bird in clouds of gold stitched onto a screen of melancholy satin. The years passed; the bird’s feathers darkened, mildewed, and were eaten by moths, but the bird stayed on the screen even in death.”
Source: Love in a Fallen City
“Don't be afraid of books, even the most dissident, seemingly 'immoral' ones. Culture is a sure bet in life, whether high, low, eclectic, pop, ancient or modern. And I am convinced that reading is one of the most important tools of liberation that any human being, and a contemporary Arab woman in particular, can exploit. I am not saying it is the ONLY tool, especially with all the new alternative - more visual, interactive and hasty - ways of knowledge, learning and growth. But how could I not be convinced of literature's power, when it has been my original emancipator?”
Source: I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman
“I look forward to being older, when what you look like becomes less and less an issue and what you are is the point."
(As quoted in Put Your Big Girl Panties on and Deal with it, Roz Van Meter, 2007)”
“You're the most unknown famous man I ever met”
Source: Women
“Born to love, cursed to feel.”
Source: Born to Love, Cursed to Feel
“I've spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had repeatedly been abandoned by his mother.”
Source: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
“Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help--except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it.”
Source: Gone with the wind