Jawwad Ismail Quotes

Thick smoke like a herd of black horses was rising over the massive building and being blown around by the wind. ~ Ismail Kadare

Shiny musical instruments wailed, their mouths open like lilies. ~ Ismail Kadare

in the first place, Majesty, a pyramid is power. It is repression,force,and wealth. But it is just as much: domination of the rabble; the narrowing of its mind; the weakening of its will; monotony; and waste. O my Pharaoh, it is your most reliable guardian. Your secret police. Your army. Your fleet. Your harem. The higher it is, the tinier your subjects will seem. And the smaller your subjects, the more you rise, o Majesty, to your full height. ~ Ismail Kadare

My streets, my cistern. My old house. Its beams, floorboards and staircase creaked slightly, almost imperceptibly, with a dry, uniform, almost constant cracking sound. What's wrong? Where does it hurt? It seemed to be complaining of aches in its bones, in its centuries-old joints. ~ Ismail Kadare

When I said a few weeks ago that our people would eat cooking oil and olives if necessary, I didn't mean that there really would be only oil and olives. What I meant was that our people have the necessary patience to endure the current difficult situation. Palestinians would rather do without certain food items than their national rights. ~ Ismail Haniyeh

It is the Muslim's conception of himself as the khulifa of Allah on the earth that makes him the vortex of human history. Only as God's khulifa, and hence only in proper commitment to the vision of Islam, may man act responsibly in the totality of space-time. ~ Ismail Al-Faruqi

in the future, the defining metric for organizations won't be ROI (Return on Investment), but ROL (Return on Learning). ~ Salim Ismail

I worked with Ismail Merchant on 'The Mystic Masseur,' I did 'Sakina's Restaurant,' I've done plays, I've been on Broadway, I've done movies, I've done TV ... but nothing has had the pop culture penetrative impact as 'The Daily Show' has. It's the nature of the beast. ~ Aasif Mandvi

It was only a phrase that went from mouth to mouth and was never quite swallowed. ~ Ismail Kadare

When the Israeli leaders launched their expansionist war in June 1967 they never envisaged that 40 years later they would still be haunted by the consequences. ~ Ismail Haniyeh

Poetry

Poetry,
How did you find your way to me?
My mother does not know Albanian well,
She writes letters like Aragon, without commas and periods,
My father roamed the seas in his youth,
But you have come,
Walking down the pavement of my quiet city of stone,
And knocked timidly at the door of my three-storey house,
At Number 16.

There are many things I have loved and hated in life,
For many a problem I have been an 'open city',
But anyway...
Like a young man returning home late at night,
Exhausted and broken by his nocturnal wanderings,
Here too am I, returning to you,
Worn out after another escapade.

And you,
Not holding my infidelity against me,
Stroke my hair tenderly,
My last stop,
Poetry. ~ Ismail Kadare

If our lives are pleasing to Allah, and our goals are things which He approves then we can expect His Divine Assistance in accomplishing them, which includes Barakah in our time. ~ Abu Muawiyah Ismail Kamdar

Eid happens twice a year - Eid ul-Fitr or "Small Eid" marks the end of the Ramadan fasting month, and Eid ul-Azha or "Big Eid" commemorates the Prophet Abraham's readiness to sacrifice his son Ismail to God. ~ Malala Yousafzai

They said 'ski', but they heard 'vodka'! ~ Ismail Kadare

Don't be distracted by the noise going on. Pause & reflect. You'll realize how much time you've wasted on all that nonsense around you. ~ Mufti Ismail Menk

Today three-quarters of the Palestinian people are displaced: there are 5 million Palestinian refugees throughout the world. ~ Ismail Haniyeh

Urdu can not die out because it has very strong roots in Persia. The language itself is not only just the language of the Muslims, but it's also the language of the Hindus. ~ Ismail Merchant

If an animal has to be sacrificed when a new bridge is built, what will it take to build a whole new world? ~ Ismail Kadare

Ismail Merchant was just the most seductive, passionate, outrageous, driven, genius of a man. ~ Glenn Close

I thought for a long time about leaving Albania, but at the same time to play a role in its life. ~ Ismail Kadare

I know that many in Europe are unhappy with their governments' policies toward the Palestinians. ~ Ismail Haniyeh

Don't ever underestimate the capacity of a human being who is determined to do something. ~ Edna Adan Ismail

I couldn't get to sleep. The book lay nearby. A thin object on the divan. So strange. Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Boiled down to little black marks. Hair, eyes, voices, nails, legs, knocks on doors, walls, blood, beards, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks. The letters run in mad haste, now here, now there. The a's, f's, y's, k's all run. They gather together to create a horse or a hailstorm. They run again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a murder. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running. Never stopping. ~ Ismail Kadare

Whereas Jesus demanded of the Jews the rejection of the tribalist Jahweh whom they identified with Israel, the race, the community the political state as object of worship and desire, the Sufis, born in an atmosphere of pure monotheism, demanded what Jesus of the first century A.D. would demand if he were to relive his early life again in present-day monotheistic Christendom. This does not mean that Jesus did not demand, like the Sufis, the cleansing of the soul from the personal deities it may worship besides God, but it does mean that the main weight of his teaching centered around the Jewish preoccupation with the tribe as God."
"The object and deal of Sufism is, therefore, identically the same as that of the radical self-transformation of Jesus. Both aimed at the state of consciousness in which God is the sole subject, the sole determiner and the sole object of love and devotion. The tradition of both later influenced each other and succeeded in developing the same kind of preparatory disciplines leading towards the end. Finally, both referred to the final end of these processes as 'oneness' and their reference was in each case exposed to the same dangers of misunderstanding, indeed to the same misunderstanding. The oneness of Jesus was misunderstood as unity and fusion of being, and thus gave rise to the greatest materialization of an essentially spiritual union history has ever seen. The oneness of the highest Sufi state was likewise misunderstood and gave rise to ~ Ismail R. Al-Faruqi

The Palestinian people do not beg the world for a state, and the state can't be created through decisions and initiatives. States liberate their land first and then the political body can be established. ~ Ismail Haniyeh

Why the Albanians had created the institution of the guest, exalting it above all other human relations, even those of kinship. "Perhaps the answer lies in the democratic character of this institution," he said, setting himself to think his way through the matter. "Any ordinary man, on any day, can be raised to the lofty station of a guest. The path to that temporary deification is open to anybody at any time.[ ... ] Given that anyone at all can grasp the sceptre of the guest," he went on, "and since that sceptre, for every Albanian, surpasses even the king's sceptre, may we not assume that in the Albanian's life of danger and want, that to be a guest if only for four hours or twenty-four hours, is a kind of respite, a moment of oblivion, a truce, a reprieve, and - why not? - an escape from everyday life into some divine reality? ~ Ismail Kadare

Can a country's people be better than its planes? ~ Ismail Kadare

The days went by without incident and often without their name. When you'd unpacked the hours from the day and then the night and piled them all up, you could toss the boxes they came in, which is all that "Wednesday" or "Friday" really are. ~ Ismail Kadare

I work only in the morning from 10 to noon. I still write by hand. I interrupt my writing when I feel that I've discovered something beautiful or, on the contrary, when I feel discontent. ~ Ismail Kadare

The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant. ~ Ismail Kadare

Albania's future is towards Christianity, since it is connected with it culturally, old memories, and its pre-Turkish nostalgia. With the passing of time, the late Islamic religion that came with the Ottomans should evaporate (at first in Albania and then in Kosova), until it will be replaced by Christianity or, to be more exact, Christian culture. Thus from one evil (the prohibition of religion in 1967) goodness will come. The Albanian nation will make a great historical correction that will accelerate its unity with its mother continent: Europe ~ Ismail Kadare

The writer is always to some extent in exile, wherever he is, because he is somehow outside, separated from others; there is always a distance. ~ Ismail Kadare

It's about a father and daughter and the daughter's friend and her relationship with her current husband. ~ Ismail Merchant

For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes. ~ Ismail Kadare

I hope that Americans will give careful and well-informed thought to root causes and historical realities, in which case I think they will question why a supposedly 'legitimate' state such as Israel has had to conduct decades of war against a subject refugee population without ever achieving its goals. ~ Ismail Haniyeh

Well, the musicals give emphasis to love, longing, melancholy, sadness. All of that is always there. ~ Ismail Merchant

Don't let past mistakes make you lose hope of achieving good. Some of those with the worst past have made a great future for themselves. ~ Mufti Ismail Menk

If only my heart could abstain
from love.

The more I seethe with desire
The more I seem to attract. ~ Hilda Ismail

This is how things come to pass in the world,' one of the princes is supposed to have said. 'Blood flows one way in life and another way in song, and one never knows which flow is the right one. ~ Ismail Kadare

Who in the world has not yearned for a loved one, has never said, If only he or she could come back just once, just one more time ... ? Despite the fact that it can never happen, never ever. Surely this is the saddest thing about our mortal world, and its sadness will go on shrouding human life like a blanket of fog until its final extinction. ~ Ismail Kadare

Obstacles on our path are some of the tests of life. They make us stronger, better people and open up doors we had never imagined. ~ Mufti Ismail Menk

In this nation people assume they can write your story from beginning to end, and wait for you to fall into place on the stage that has been set, it is why every conversation scans like a hostage negotiation, with your humanity being the item that's up for deliberation. ~ Rafeif Ismail

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible ... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship. ~ Ismail Kadare

(Refresher course I just completed twenty minutes ago: In the Koran, it is Ismail, Abraham's elder son by Sarah's maidservant Hagar, whom Sarah gave to Abraham as concubine to bear them a child, that Abraham takes up the mountain with plans to sacrifice. In the Old Testament it's Isaac, Abraham's younger son by Sarah herself, Abraham takes up the mountain. In this version Sarah sees Ismail playing with Isaac long before the trip up the mountain, becomes jealous about her own son's inheritance - even though the whole Hagar-Abraham thing was her idea to begin with - and forces Abraham to send Hagar and Ismail away.) ~ Claire Sydenham

I'm sure things will get better. So...it's okay to stop fighting. ~ Yosuke Kuroda

Sunday had spread all over the city. It looked as if the sun had smacked into the earth and broken into pieces and chunks of wet light were scattered everywhere
in the streets, on the window panes, on puddles and roofs. I remembered a day long ago when Grandmother had cleaned a big fish. Her forearms were splattered with shiny scales. It was as if she had Sunday in her whole body. When my father got angry, he had Tuesday. ~ Ismail Kadare

The liberals and free people of the world will not like to see the Palestinian people living under siege. We have received indications from the international community that they will not stop their aid. ~ Ismail Haniyeh

We need to return to the cosmopolitanism of Alexandria of yore, and marry that with the tolerance and democracy of Europe today ~ Ismail Serageldin