Khurram Shehzad > Khurram's Quotes

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
― Maya Angelou

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

(Popular misquote of "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.")”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.”
― Maya Angelou

“There are times when you've personally known things to misfire--the sentence that fell badly, the dull gift, slapdash comment, hobbled punch line, tight-fisted tip--trying to be too stupid, trying to be too clever, too silly, too carefree, too caring, too free. You can think back to those long and hollow pauses when you realised that you'd misjudged a mood, weren't paying attention, had taken the wrong risk.”
― A.L. Kennedy, The Blue Book

“Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Well, if that's suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“It doesn't always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“How often in life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Yes, the world makes room for goodness and decency, he thinks: and the task of life is to show goodness to others, not to complain about their failings.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“You can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“But it is a pleasure, isn't it, on a crisp September night in Dublin to walk with long free strides along a quiet street. In the prime of his life. Incumbent on him now to enjoy such fleeting pleasures. Next minute might die. Happens every day to someone.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“We’re being hard on ourselves in a way, he remarks, because both our lives involve some voluntary exposure to what other people might call defeat. Which I think requires a certain degree of courage.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Nonetheless, it is better to feel hopeful and optimistic about one’s life on earth while engaged in the never-ending struggle to pay rent, than to feel despondent and depressed while engaged in the same non-optional struggle anyway.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“But I’m very happy that I met you. And even knowing that you’re alive, I feel like my life will be a lot better. Just being able to remember – being with you, and having such a nice experience together.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“She has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person. Young men can invite her into holiday cottages for sexual reasons. It means nothing. That isn't true: it means something, but the meaning is unfamiliar.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Once you meet your soulmate, there’s no point pretending, is there? Feeling of solace you get when she’s near you. To live the right life.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Nobody when they're rejected believes it's really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction — which even makes sense from an evolutionary perspective — is simply the strangest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Is the word ‘passionate’, or is it not, basically an obscene item of vocabulary? No, it isn’t. But is it like a small bandage placed over an item of vocabulary that is in fact obscene? Maybe, yes. A word with blood running through it, a red word. In casual conversation it’s better to use words that are grey or beige.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“To do what little good he can with his life. To ask for nothing more, to bow his head, pitifully grateful, God’s humble and grateful servant. Can he imagine anything less like himself? And yet here he is, defeated, relieved, forgiving everything, praying only to be forgiven.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“He doesn’t want after all for others to be poor, doesn’t even want to be rich. No. He only wants what he has always wanted: to be right, to be once and for all proven right.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“No one is perfect. Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you. And then in other people’s lives you do the same thing, you’re the person who lets everyone down, who fails to make anything better, and you hate yourself so much you wish you were dead.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“To remember that God is not the nice man Jesus, who liked everybody and went around healing the sick; that God is, on the contrary, the one who makes people sick, who condemns people to death, for incomprehensible reasons. Jesus the healer, the listener, teacher, friend of sinners, seems in Margaret’s mind to be practically on the brink of murmuring: Sorry about my dad… Jesus is easy to love and God much harder.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Doesn’t the feeling between people have a truth of its own? Not in the sense of formal propositional truth-value, no. But then why does that word, ‘truth,’ have a certain sensation to it, which is not exhausted by the formal definition?”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Nothing he has done or felt in this regard before has prepared him remotely for this new experience, with Margaret: the experience of mutual desire. To feel an interpenetration of thought between the two of them, understanding her, looking at her and knowing, yes, even without speaking, what she feels and wants, and knowing that she understands him also, completely.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“When he saw her waiting for him at the gate: to encounter not only her, the beauty of her nearness renewed, but also himself, the self that is loved by her, and therefore worthy of his own respect.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“How capable he has been of holding in his mind with no apparent struggle such contradictory beliefs and feelings. The false true lover, the cynical idealist, the atheist at his prayers.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo