“She Made You Decent, And In Return You Made Her So Happy”

When Mahmoud Darwish said, "A University degree, four books and hundereds of articles and I still make mistakes when reading. You wrote me 'good morning' and I read it as 'I love you'."

You were holding my heart in the palms of your hand. You could have been gentle yet you decided to crush it.

Shams smiled fleetingly. “Every man has a degree of womanliness inside.”

“Even the ones who are manly men?”

“Especially those, my dear,” Shams said, garnishing his words with a wink and dropping his voice to a whisper, as if sharing a secret.

—The Forty Rules of Love

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place because you’ll never be this way ever again.”

— Azar Nafisi

I wonder if we ever think of each other at the same time

I mistook your daggers as smiles

Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected in pain.

The feminine urge to love them with your whole heart even when you know it will never be reciprocated.

When I was in school, I started writing short stories. Then, I wrote poetry. But what I really want to write is a novel. A long tale, in which I can find myself. But it never happens. Every time I sit down to write...it turns into poetry.

—Cobalt Blue(2022).

I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.

—Tengo

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, Book 2