Anam Quotes & Sayings

This war that has taken so many sons has spared mine. This
age that has burned so many daughters has not burned mine.
I have not let it. — Tahmima Anam

When we drop all of our painful effort to attain something, then suddenly there is spaciousness in our consciousness, a sense of being unobstructed, and we are able to enjoy life as it comes. — Anam Thubten

...even if all they did was look at each other, it rattled her entire being because there was no thought or person or barrier between them. Not a single one. They were both thoroughly absorbed in every moment they spent together. It was terrifying. Like being swept away by a powerful wind, where your body rendered all its control to another force that could ignite as well as destroy you. — Anam Iqbal

I have come to the conclusion that life in the Antarctic Regions can be very pleasant. — Robert Falcon Scott

Success is like a liberation or the first phrase of a love story. — Jeanne Moreau

Rehana regarded the saris and tried to recall the feeling they had given her, of being at once enveloped and set free, the tight revolutions of material around her hips and legs limiting movement, the empty space between blouse and petticoat permitting unexpected sensations -- the thrill of a breeze that has strayed low, through an open window, the knowledge of heat in strange places, the back, the exposed belly. It was the bringing together of night and day.... — Tahmima Anam

He darted for her; his blade wielded smooth and steady in front of him. She didn't hold back either; when they joined, their weapons clanked and sparked with an icy rage. They danced around one another; their feet light yet balanced, their arms twisting and turning with every thundering blow they made. — Anam Iqbal

The one you love, your anam cara, your soul friend, is the truest mirror to reflect your soul. — John O'Donohue

I long to drift through turquoise skies;
race the wind in rampant flight.
Ruddy chains have framed my eyes,
they seize my heart and stain the light. — Craig Froman

Death was a friend to her; she was unafraid of it: bringing to to others, meeting it herself. And yet, she'd flinched from it today... What was it about that man that she just couldn't let go? Couldn't conquer the part of her heart that had loved him? — Anam Iqbal

It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, 'Being here is so much,' and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. — John O'Donohue

His body sang with electric energy at their closeness. He'd been physical with many girls in the past, but he'd never felt anything quite like this. They were barely touching and yet every sense in his body was raging like the surface of a storming sea. — Anam Iqbal

Before placing her in her mother's arms, she whispered, as she had at all the other births, hello, little amphibian. Someone had to acknowledge the strangeness of this soul, and the distance it had traversed, millions and millions of years, in order to be here. — Tahmima Anam

Adults, Sophie has decided a long time before, were really bad at making up good excuses. — Michael Scott

My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time, she went down again so soon, that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the utmost pain; for it heralded the moment which was to follow it, when she would have left me and gone downstairs again. — Marcel Proust

It paid barely a living wage, but he stayed with it - gradually and in the end gratefully arriving at the point in life when you understand there are no great changes ahead. — Ann Packer

Do you trust this boy?"
"I trust that he's probably listening to this conversation right now."
"Surely he's capable of being a gentleman and wouldn't do such a thing," she said with false sweetness. I knew she was saying it to him, not me. I wondered how Kaidan would fare against a mother's guilt trip. — Wendy Higgins

There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago. — David Mamet

Longchenpa said, "Good concepts are like a golden chain. Bad concepts are like an iron chain. — Anam Thubten

In everyone's life, there is great need for an anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person's soul. This recognition is described in a beautiful line from Pablo Neruda: "You are like nobody since I love you." This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person's individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it an decipher identity and destiny. — John O'Donohue

This was different, spontaneous, unrestricted. This was what dancing was supposed to feel like - like freedom. — Anam Iqbal

She was floating in the midst of a black sea, in the darkest of nights, with no hope or care to see light again. She was a mere wave away from drowning in blackness. — Anam Iqbal

Diana accuses me of losing my sense of history. The hands that arrange her bones, that brush away the layers of earth that weighed heavy on her for fifty million years, those hands should be light and unattached, not heartsick, that embarrassing word, not longing for human touch, for the particular grooves of another person's lifetline, but something else entirely, a pair of moving parts mindful of all that is ancient, and endures. I bristle at her rebuke, knowing she is right. — Tahmima Anam

I think video games are a huge part of our society now. Having kids play baseball video games helps them understand and love the game. It could actually push them to get out there and play the game for real. That's great for the sport. — Justin Verlander

How very close it is to illness. The loose, restless limbs. The feverish cheeks. The burning salt of the heart. The prickle of sweat. Love. — Tahmima Anam

This world is gradually becoming a place Where I do not care to be any more. — John Berryman

The Angel of Death had sworn retribution, and she wasn't going to stop until she'd killed them all. — Anam Iqbal

For years I have been accused of making snap judgments. Honestly, this is not the case because I am a profound military student and the thoughts I express, perhaps too flippantly, are the result of years of thought and study. — George S. Patton

Bay's room was the first one at the top of the staircase. It was painted a dove gray that turned peacock blue after dark, as if the room absorbed the warmth of daylight and radiated with it at night. — Sarah Addison Allen

As he left, he saw the streets were just as deserted and quiet as before, but now he knew it was an illusion. There were ninjas, darker than a starless night, watching their territory and his every move from the rooftops high above. — Anam Iqbal

The constant influx of new cultures, new ideas and new ways of looking at old problems is a big part of the reason why America has been the most dynamic economy in the world for well over a century. — Gary Locke

Her hands on the harmonium were delicate, square-tipped, her bitten-down nails paying homage to the seriousness of the task; her brows were knitted together in the service of the song, and in the end it was only to the music that she was bound. In singing she was, in only briefly, a supplicant, as though in the presence of a divinity that even she, devout non-believer, had to somehow acknowledge — Tahmima Anam

He was the one for her. She somehow knew that no one could make her feel the way did. Not if she lived for another hundred years. — Anam Iqbal

It comes and goes. People think if you're sick you become fearless and brave, but you don't. Most of the time it's like being stalked by a psycho, like I might get shot any second. But sometimes I forget for hours.'
'What makes you forget?'
'People. Doing stuff. When I was with you in the wood, I forgot for a whole afternoon. — Jenny Downham

A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world. — Sigmund Freud