Migration Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Migration. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Every butterfly in the world has migrated to my stomach.
Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1))
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
إنني أريد أن آخذ حقي من الحياة عنوة.أريد أن أعطي بسخاء، أريد أن يفيض الحب من قلبي فينبع ويثمر.ثمة آفاق كثيرة لابد أن تزار، ثمة ثمار يجب أن تقطف، كتب كثيرة تقرأ، وصفحات بيضاء في سجل العمر، سأكتب فيها جملاً واضحة بخط جريء.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
I crush her against me. I want to be part of her. Not just inside her but all around her. I want our rib cages to crack open and our hearts to migrate and merge. I want our cells to braid together like living thread.
Isaac Marion (Warm Bodies (Warm Bodies, #1))
سأحيا لأن ثمة أناس قليلين أحب أن أبقى معهم أطول وقت ممكن ولأن عليّ واجبات يجب أن أؤديها ,لا يعنيني إن كان للحياة معنى أو لم يكن لها معنى وإن كنت لا أستطيع أن أغفر فسأحاول أن أنسى
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes
Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
Graham Chapman (Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Book): Mønti Pythøn Ik Den Hølie Gräilen (Bøk))
when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
Mohsin Hamid (Exit West)
Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns." [Letter to Miss Lewis, Oct. 1, 1841]
George Eliot (George Eliot’s Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals (Cambridge Library Collection - Literary Studies))
Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.
Hal Borland
Grief is a swallow,' he said. 'One day you wake up and you think it's gone, but it's only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.
Elif Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World)
كلنا يا بني نسافر وحدنا فى نهاية الامر
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
The wind makes you ache is some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die.
Stephen King
إنك يا سيد مصطفى سعيد رغم تفوقك العلمي رجل غبي، إن في تكوينك الروحي بقعة مظلمة، لقد بددت أعظم طاقة يمنحها الله للناس : طاقة الحب
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.
Elif Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees)
It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time.
Mohsin Hamid (Exit West)
كنت افكر وان اري الشاطئ يضيق في مكان ويتسع في مكان اخر شأن الحياة تعطي بيد وتأخد باليد الاخري
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
لا لست انا الحجر الذي يلقي في الماء ولكني البذرة التي تبذر في الحقل
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
At some point, our lips met and it was perhaps the most wonderful thing I'd ever experienced. And truly, I guess there wasn't just one kiss, but several. A polite frenzy. A mass migration of delicate wildebeest kisses. I remember them as one transcendent event, though.
Dean Hale
أشباح الليل تتبخر مع الفجر ، وحمى النهار تبرد مع نسيم الليل
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
كان ذلك وداعنا . لا دموع لا قُبَل لا ضوضاء . مخلوقان سارا شطراً من الطريق معاً ، ثم سلك كل منهما سبيله
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
نعلم الناس لنفتح أذهانهم و نطلق طاقاتهم المحبوسة .و لكننا لا نستطيع أن نتنبأ بالنتيجة ،الحرية..نحرر العقول من الخرافات .نعطى الشعب مفاتيح المستقبل ليتصرف فيه كيف يشاء.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
مثلنا تماماً يولدون ويموتون وفي الرحلة من المهد إلى اللحد يحلمون أحلاماً بعضها يصدق وبعضها يخيب ،يخافون من المجهول وينشدون الحب ويبحثون عن الطمأنينة في الزوج والولد
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
A life's impact can be measured by what it gives and what it leaves behind, but it can also be measured by what it steals from the world.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
أليس من الأفضل أن نهاجر بدلاً من أن نتزوج؟ فالزواج هجرة داخلية
Naguib Mahfouz (الحب تحت المطر)
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
Thomas Merton
In other news, It’s seven sols till the harvest, and I still haven’t prepared. For starters, I need to make a hoe. Also, I need to make an outdoor shed for the potatoes. I can’t just pile them up outside. The next major storm would cause The Great Martian Potato Migration.
Andy Weir (The Martian)
لو أن كل إنسان عرف متى يمتنع عن اتخاذ الخطوة الأولى , لتغيرت أشياء كثيرة. هل الشمس شريرة حين تحيل قلوب ملايين البشر إلى صحارى تتعارك رمالها و يجف فيها حلق العندليب؟
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
I want to take my rightful share of life by force, I want to give lavishly, I want love to flow from my heart, to ripen and bear fruit. There are many horizons that must be visited, fruit that must be plucked, books read, and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed with vivid sentences in a bold hand.
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
Diversity is an aspect of human existence that cannot be eradicated by terrorism or war or self-consuming hatred. It can only be conquered by recognizing and claiming the wealth of values it represents for all.
Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
Mohsin Hamid (Exit West)
The captivating changes in the social space sealed by class transmigration may astound us. How clever class fugitives escape from their birth stigma or topical inheritance and how they blend slickly into a new chosen communal grouping may look impressive to most observers. Class migration always remains a challenge, but once the outgoers are at the end of the road, they can tell their life stories of adventure, bravery, or hardship with much self-esteem. How happy they are, and how good they feel when they can say with satisfaction that they have seen it all before closing brackets. (“Schengen”)
Erik Pevernagie
لو ان كل انسان عرف متى يمتنع عن اتخاذ الخطوة الاولى , لتغيرت اشياء كثيرة.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.
Rachel Carson (The Sense of Wonder)
Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life...
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
But there won’t be any more journeys after this one, no more oceans explored. And maybe that’s why I am filled with calm. My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured.
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
التجاعيد الدقيقة على جبهتها وعلى اركان فمها لا تقول انها شاخت , بل تقول انها نضجت .
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)
exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.
Edward W. Said (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Convergences: Inventories of the Present))
I don't know how to force the world into a shape I can manage.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
الناس في بلدنا لرتابة الحياة عندهم يجعلون من أي حدث سعيد مهما صغر عذرا لإقامة حفل كحفل العرس
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
نحن بمقاييس العالم الصناعي الأوروبي، فلاحون فقراء، و لكنني حين أعانق جدي أحس بالغنى، كأنني نغمة من دقات قلب الكون نفسه.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones. There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside. The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'.
Bruce Chatwin (The Songlines)
لا توجد سحابه واحده تبشر بالأمل في هذه السماء الحاره ، كأنها غطاء الجحيم . اليوم هنا شئ لا قيمة له ، مجرد عذاب يتعذبه الكائن الحي في إنتظار الليل . الليل هو الخلاص
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
سنكون كما نحن, قوم عاديون, و إذا كنا أكاذيب, فنحن أكاذيب من صنع أنفسنا.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
Let him who has not a single speck of migration to blot his family escutcheon cast the first stone...if you didn't migrate then your father did, and if your father didn't need to move from place to place, then it was only because your grandfather before him had no choice but to go, put his old life behind him in search of the bread that his own land denied him...
José Saramago (The Notebook)
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them.
Neil Gaiman
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
One World is not abolishing frontiers, which would lead to a surge in migration, create tension and destabilise life on our planet. One World is rather abolishing the concept of borders in people's minds and replacing devotion to individual nations with belief in one united world, home to one race: the human race.
Mouloud Benzadi
The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
أشباح الليل تتبخر مع الفجر ، وحمى النهار تبرد مع نسيم الليل
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
فقلت لمحجوب :السياسة أفسدتك.أصبحت لا تفكر الا فى السلطة .دعك من الوزارات و الحكومة و حدثنى عنه كانسان.أى نوع من الناس كان هو؟
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception.
Ashim Shanker (Only the Deplorable (Migrations, Volume II))
It’s impossible to control someone else’s capacity for forgiveness.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
I never worked out how to be relied upon and also free.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
Now I'm making a decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. If I am unable to forgive, then I shall try to forget. I shall live by force and cunning."­
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
A song of despair The memory of you emerges from the night around me. The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea. Deserted like the dwarves at dawn. It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one! Cold flower heads are raining over my heart. Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked. In you the wars and the flights accumulated. From you the wings of the song birds rose. You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss. The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse. Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver, turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank! In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded. Lost discoverer, in you everything sank! You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire, sadness stunned you, in you everything sank! I made the wall of shadow draw back, beyond desire and act, I walked on. Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost, I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you. Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness. and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar. There was the black solitude of the islands, and there, woman of love, your arms took me in. There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle. Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms! How terrible and brief my desire was to you! How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid. Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs, still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds. Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs, oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies. Oh the mad coupling of hope and force in which we merged and despaired. And the tenderness, light as water and as flour. And the word scarcely begun on the lips. This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing, and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank! Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you, what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned! From billow to billow you still called and sang. Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel. You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents. Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well. Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank! It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all the timetables. The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore. Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate. Deserted like the wharves at dawn. Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands. Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything. It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!
Pablo Neruda
We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it’s precious, and maybe it’s enough, and maybe it’s right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it’s right that our consciousness rests. The thought is peaceful.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
It was like a dam of musical critique had broken. Imasu turned on him with eyes that flashed instead of shining. "It is worse than you can possibly imagine! When you play, all of my mother's flowers lose the will to live and expire on the instant. The quinoa has no flavour now. The llamas are migrating because of your music, and llamas are not a migratory animal. The children now believe there is a sickly monster, half horse and half large mournful chicken, that lives in tha lake and calls out to the world to grant it the sweet release of death.
Cassandra Clare (What Really Happened in Peru (The Bane Chronicles, #1))
و لهذا ، فأنا لا انواي بك شراً الا بقدر ما يكون البحر شريراً حين تتحطم السفن على صخوره
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
من ولد الخير ولد له فراخا تطير بالسرور.ومن ولد الشر أنبت له شجرا أشواكه الحسرة و ثمرة الندم.فرحم الله امءا أغضى عن الأخطاء و استمتع بالظاهر.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
رجل الاقتصاد ليس كاتبا كتشارلز ديكنز،ولا سياسيا كروزفلت .،انه أداة ،آلة،لا قيمة لا بدون الحقائق و الأرقام و الاحصائيات .أقصى ما يستطيع أن يفعله هو أن يحدد العلاقة بين حقيقة و أخرى،بين رقم و آخر،أما أن تجعل الأرقام تقول شيئا دون آخر،فذلك شأن الحكام و رجال السياسة.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
I don’t know. What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. For I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide. In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. ... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve, and cherish, the pale blue dot; the only home we've ever known.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday as I moved Southwards week by week, easily, lazily, lingering as long as I dared, but always heeding the call!
Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows)
From now on, when we board, each time we board, I will remind you to be terrified,' she says. 'And you remind me, too: this is not normal.' 'This is not normal.' Soledad nods.
Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt)
إننى أسمع فى هذه المحكمة صليل سيوف الرومان فى قرطاجة، وقعقعة سنابك خيل اللنبي و هي تطأ أرض القدس،البواخر مخرت أول مرة تحمل المدافع لا الخبز ،وسكك الحديد أنشئت أصلا لنقل الجنود. و قد أنشأوا المدارس ليعلمونا كيف نقول "نعم" بلغتهم. إنهم جلبوا إلينا جرثومة العنف الأوروبي الأكبر الذى لم يشهد العالم مثيله من قبل فى السوم وفى فردان، جرثومة مرض فتاك أصابهم منذ أكثر من ألف عام. نعم يا سادتي، إنني جئتكم غازياً فى عقر داركم. قطرة من السم الذي حقنتم به شرايين التاريخ. أنا لست عطيلا. عطيل كان أكذوبة.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
I personally subscribe to Dr. King’s definition of an unjust law as being ‘out of harmony with the moral law.’ And the higher moral law here is that people have a human right to move, to change location, if they experience hunger, poverty, violence, or lack of opportunity, especially if that climate in their home countries is created by the United States, as is the case with most third world countries from which people migrate. Ain’t that ’bout a bitch.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (The Undocumented Americans)
كان ذهني قد صفا حينئذ، وتحددت علاقتي بالنهر، إنني طاف فوق الماء ولكنني لست جزءا منه، فكرت أنني إذا مت في تلك اللحظة فإنني أكون قد مت كما ولدت، دون إرادتي. طول حياتي لم أختر ولم أقرر. إنني أقرر الآن أنني أختار الحياة. سأحيا لأن ثمة أناس قليلون أحب أن أبقى معهم أطول وقت ممكن، ولأن علي واجبات يجب أن أؤديها، لا يهمني إن كان للحياة معنا أو لم يكن لها معنى. وإذا كنت لا أستطيع أن أغفر فسأحاول أن أنسى.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
They will never be the same again because you just cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.
NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names)
They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
I can't move to pull on my clothes except that somehow I do, and I can't stand on two feet except that somehow I do, and I can't walk, there's no way I can walk, except I do. I take step after step after step after step.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
December stillness, teach me through your trees That loom along the west, one with the land, The veiled evangel of your mysteries. While nightfall, sad and spacious, on the down Deepens, and dusk embues me where I stand, With grave diminishings of green and brown, Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words; And let me learn your secret from the sky, Following a flock of steadfast-journeying birds In lone remote migration beating by. December stillness, crossed by twilight roads, Teach me to travel far and bear my loads.
Siegfried Sassoon
Comfort...was the key ingredient to making the prisoner crave the prison.
Ashim Shanker (Only the Deplorable (Migrations, Volume II))
Originally, he'd wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H's life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H's story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he'd have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He'd have to talk about Harlem, And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father's heroin addiction - the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the '60s, wouldn't he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the '80s? And if he wrote about crack, he'd inevitably be writing, to, about the "war on drugs." And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he'd be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he'd gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he'd get so angry that he'd slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they'd think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.
Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing)
فليبنوا المدارس أولا ثم يناقشوا توحيد التعليم.كيف يفكر هؤلاء الناس؟ يضيعون الوقت فى المؤتمرات و الكلام الفارغ و نحن هنا أولادنا يسافرون كذا ميلا للمدرسة.ألسنا بشرا؟ ألسنا ندفع الضرائب؟ أليس لنا حق فى هذا البلد؟كل شئ فى الخرطوم.مستشفى واحد فى مروى نسافر له ثلاثة أيام، النساء يمتن أثناء الوضع.لا توجد داية واحدة متعلمة فى هذا البلد. و أنت ماذا تصنع فى الخرطوم؟ ما الفائدة ان يكون لنا ابن فى الحكومة ولا يفعل شيئا؟
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
Kaloka! Ito ba ang Pilipinas na gustong iligtas nina Lola Sepa at Emil? Iligtas mula saan? Kung sarili nga ayaw nitong iligtas! Ang gusto lang ng mga ito'y kumain, tumae, mag-Glutathione, saka pumunta sa weekend markets, mag-malling para makalibre ng air-con, mag-text ng corny jokes, sumingit sa pila ng bigas, saka umasa ng suwerte sa lotto o sa TV! Kapag may bagyo o lindol o anumang problema'y laban pero susuko din agad at makakalimot, o kaya ay magma-migrate! Ilang taon na ba ang bansang ito pero bakit hanggang ngayo'y wala pa ring pinagkatandaan?
Ricky Lee (Si Amapola sa 65 na Kabanata)
نحن بمقاييس العالم الصناعي الأوربي ، فلاحون فقراء ، ولكنني حين أعانق جدي أحس بالغني ، كأنني نغمه من دقات قلب الكون نفسه . إنه ليس شجرة سنديان شامخه وارفة الفروع في أرض منت عليها الطبيعه بالماء والخصب ، ولكنه كشجيرات السيال في صحاري السودان ، سميكة اللحي حادة الأشواك ، تقهر الموت لأنها لا تسرف في الحياه . وهذا وجه العجب
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women’s absence from quest-for-identity novels, “there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.”3 The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.4
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary catastrophe.
Terence McKenna (Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge)
THE DREAM THAT MUST BE INTERPRETED This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. But there's a difference with this dream. Everything cruel and unconscious done in the illusion of the present world, all that does not fade away at the death-waking. It stays, and it must be interpreted. All the mean laughing, all the quick, sexual wanting, those torn coats of Joseph, they change into powerful wolves that you must face. The retaliation that sometimes comes now, the swift, payback hit, is just a boy's game to what the other will be. You know about circumcision here. It's full castration there! And this groggy time we live, this is what it's like: A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived, and he dreams he's living in another town. In the dream, he doesn't remember the town he's sleeping in his bed in. He believes the reality of the dream town. The world is that kind of sleep. The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again. That's how a young person turns toward a teacher. That's how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.
Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi) (The Essential Rumi)
He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.
Charlotte McConaghy (Migrations)
ثلاثون عاماً. وأشجار الصفصاف تبيض وتخضر وتصفر في الحدائق، وطير الوقواق يغني للربيع كل عام. ثلاثون عاما وقاعة البرت تغص كل ليلة بعشاق بيتهوفن وباخ. البحر في مده وجزره في بورتمث وبرايتن، ومنطقة البحيرات تزدهي عاماً بعد عام. الجزيرة مثل لحن عذب، سعيد حزين، في تحول سرابي مع تحول الفصول. ثلاثون عاماً وأنا جزء من كل هذا، أعيش فيه، ولا أحس جماله الحقيقي.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not cream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro's making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.... Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential.... There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem--a magnanimous understanding by both races--is the first step toward its solution.
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
His hatred for all was so intense that it should extinguish the very love from which it was conceived. And thus, he ceased to feel. There was nothing further in which to believe that made the prospect of feeling worthwhile. Daily he woke up and cast downtrodden eyes upon the sea and he would say to himself with a hint of regret at his hitherto lack of indifference, 'All a dim illusion, was it? Surely it was foolish of me to think any of this had meaning.' He would then spend hours staring at the sky, wondering how best to pass the time if everything—even the sky itself— were for naught. He arrived at the conclusion that there was no best way to pass the time. The only way to deal with the illusion of time was to endure it, knowing full well, all the while, that one was truly enduring nothing at all. Unfortunately for him, this nihilistic resolution to dispassion didn’t suit him very well and he soon became extremely bored. Faced now with the choice between further boredom and further suffering, he impatiently chose the latter, sailing another few weeks along the coast , and then inland, before finally dropping anchor off the shores of the fishing village of Yami.
Ashim Shanker (Only the Deplorable (Migrations, Volume II))
What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what he Himself takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash--at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.
Thomas Merton (New Seeds of Contemplation)
انتهت الحرب بالنصر لنا جميعا،الحجارة و الأشجارو الحيوانات و الحديد،و أنا الآن تحت هذه السماء الجميلة الرحيمة أحس أننا جميعا اخوة.الذى يسكر و الذى يصلى و الذى يسرق و الذى يزنى و الذى يقاتل و الذى يقتل.الينبوع نفسه ولا أحد يعلم ماذا يدور فى خلد الاله .لعله لا يبالى.لعله ليس غاضبا .فى ليلة مثل هذه تحس أنك تستطيع أن ترقى الى السماء على سلم من الحبال.هذه أرض الشعر و الممكن و ابنتى اسمها آمال.سنهدم و نبنى و سنخضع الشمس ذاتها لارادتنا وسنهزم الفقر بأى وسيلة.
الطيب صالح (Season of Migration to the North)
At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death; the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens; the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments; the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page; the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses, for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert; the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self; the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl; the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought; the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands; the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language; the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.
Octavio Paz
When Magnus looked at Imasu, he saw Imasu had dropped his head into his hands. "Er," Magnus said. "Are you quite all right?" "I was simply overcome," Imasu said in a faint voice. Magnus preened slightly. "Ah. Well." "By how awful that was," Imasu said. Magnus blinked. "Pardon?" "I can't live a lie any longer!" Imasu burst out. "I have tried to be encouraging. Dignitaries of the town have been sent to me, asking me to plead with you to stop. My own sainted mother begged me, with tears in her eyes - " "It isn't as bad as all that - " "Yes, it is!" It was like a dam of musical critique had broken. Imasu turned on him with eyes that flashed instead of shining. "It is worse than you can possibly imagine! When you play, all of my mother's flowers lose the will to live and expire on the instant. The quinoa has no flavor now. The llamas are migrating because of your music, and llamas are not a migratory animal. The children now believe there is a sickly monster, half horse and half large mournful chicken, that lives in the lake and calls out to the world to grant it the sweet release of death. The townspeople believe that you and I are performing arcane magic rituals - " "Well, that one was rather a good guess," Magnus remarked. " - using the skull of an elephant, an improbably large mushroom, and one of your very peculiar hats!" "Or not," said Magnus. "Furthermore, my hats are extraordinary." "I will not argue with that." Imasu scrubbed a hand through his thick black hair, which curled and clung to his fingers like inky vines. "Look, I know that I was wrong. I saw a handsome man, thought that it would not hurt to talk a little about music and strike up a common interest, but I don't deserve this. You are going to get stoned in the town square, and if I have to listen to you play again, I will drown myself in the lake." "Oh," said Magnus, and he began to grin. "I wouldn't. I hear there is a dreadful monster living in that lake." Imasu seemed to still be brooding about Magnus's charango playing, a subject that Magnus had lost all interest in. "I believe the world will end with a noise like the noise you make!" "Interesting," said Magnus, and he threw his charango out the window. "Magnus!" "I believe that music and I have gone as far as we can go together," Magnus said. "A true artiste knows when to surrender." "I can't believe you did that!" Magnus waved a hand airily. "I know, it is heartbreaking, but sometimes one must shut one's ears to the pleas of the muse." "I just meant that those are expensive and I heard a crunch.
Cassandra Clare (The Bane Chronicles)
This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people's arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns. The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum. Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups). Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.
Simone Collins (The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality: What Turns People On, Why, and What That Tells Us About Our Species (The Pragmatist's Guide))
There will be times in which things appear hopeless. You will begin to doubt everything around you. You will even begin to doubt yourself. You will think things will never look up and you may be in the deepest, darkest, loneliest place in the world. Everything which had once been infused with wonder may appear disappointing and harsh. You may grow cynical and come to believe that this is simply the way the world is...that one must bear with the unforgiving realities of the world and only hope that it doesn’t get worse. You might grow suspicious of others, as adults tend to do, and close yourself off from the rest of the world. You might just look to the past and reminisce about better days...or you might just dwell in one place for a little too long and become nostalgic for the future. Just remember—regardless of where you are, what experiences you have, and who you have become—that there will always be those who have loved you. Those whom you may have taken for granted, but have nonetheless, always had you in their hearts and in their hopes and wishes. Lives that you have touched: whether you realize it or not. To separation you may venture, but indissolubly in union shall you drift...you will always be at the whims of forces, both great and small, and far beyond your capacity to control. That’s how all our stories go. Innumerable arcs intersect and scatter into a vast indefinite sea.
Ashim Shanker (Don't Forget to Breathe (Migrations, Volume I))