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Quote by Nadia Hashimi

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Sparks Like Stars

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Nadia Hashimi

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“All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,—nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil,—and my soul whispers ever to me saying, “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.” No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil! I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes was peering far beyond this narrow Now. In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.”

“Father! Father!' the boy called repeatedly, but the man remained lifeless in his arms. The horrified boy felt hopeless, deprived of any basis for understanding as to what had happened. Now he was left alone, without answers or any help, desperate to do something to help his father. Tierney didn’t know what to do. Confused and terrified, the boy cradled his father’s limp body in his arms and wept bitterly.”

“Somewhere between brute silence and last Sunday's Thirteen hundred thousand sermons; Somewhere between Calvin on Christ (God help us!) and the lizards; Somewhere between seeing and speaking, somewhere Between our soiled and greasy currency of words And the first star, the great moths fluttering About the ghosts of flowers, Lies the clear place where I, no longer I, Nevertheless remember Love's nightlong wisdom of the other shore; And, listening to the wind, remember too That other night, that first of widowhood, Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark. Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably! But I, no longer I, In this clear place between my thought and silence See all I had and long, anguish and joys, Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass, Blue, unpossessed and open.”

“Cities can do this. Cast off their onetime identity and - while wearing the same (but now reconstructed) exterior-become something new. We as individuals can also change physical shape. We can lose weight and gain muscle, or go the other way and give in to flab. We can wear clothes that speak volumes about the images we want to present to the world. We can display our wealth, our poverty, our sense of confidence, our sense of self doubt. We can, like cities, change all the externals. But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities- it's capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us-all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got, all that we got but never wanted, all that was found and lost.”