Nafisa Haji Quotes

• “that there are many things that we cant understand. the past. the bad things that happened... and we become afraid. of what might happen in the future. its okay to be afraid. but we have to keep hoping and believeing... to keep hoping and trying our best to be good and do good. even when we're afraid”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “You won't understand this now, Saira. Later, perhaps. When you are older. When you learn that life is not only about the choices you make. That some of them will be made for you.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “There is an old Arab Bedouin saying: I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world. That is jungle law. It is the way of the world when the world is thrown into chaos. It is our job to avert that chaos, to fight against it, to resist the urge to become savage. Because the problem with such law is that if you follow it, you are always fighting against someone.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “Faith is revelation. And in order to receive revelation you have to be open. Belief is about closing yourself off -- a lie you tell yourself to make the world fit in with how you've decided it should be. Real faith is an action - a verb. It's truth unfolding.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “These tears are proof that there is love in the world. Tears are only bitter when we cry selfishly for ourselves. When we deny and forget the sweet love that tears are made of. When we let sorrow turn to anger. When people cry for each other, it is a good thing. Always remember that you are a human being, connected to all other human beings. When you cry for others you are opening your heart to God, who must see what we do and weep for us, too, for the suffering we cause to one another and to ourselves.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “What I saw there explained everything--the reason he had stayed away, why he had come to say good-bye. I can only describe what I saw by its effect on me. Every woman should be looked at in such a way, at least once her life. With a longing that cannot be contained--with love that goes beyond mere feeling because it transforms and-like the verse of the poem he had read--it dissolves, as an offering, a gift. I felt my face flush and waves of knowing suffused every pore, every cell of my being. I was loved. And in that love, I felt beauty--my own, unrealized until that moment, suddenly rising to consciousness in a way that made everything in me come alive to the beauty all around me. Nothing more needed to be said.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “The only way to rise above is to rise above. The only way to respond to wrong is with right. The only way to deal with injustice is to be just.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “No story worth telling should ever be about blame or regret. What happened was what was meant to happen.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “The only law that means anything - that can have anything to do with God - is one that is alive and that strives for justice given the circumstances of the present. Otherwise, the law is merely something dead, a weapon in the hands of those with power. Against those with none.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “He knows what lies before them, and what is after them, and they comprehend not anything of His knowledge save such as He wills.' i traced the words with my finger, over and over again, and realize what i did not before. that not all questions can be answered. that some truths are beyond the capacity of our minds to understand.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “Reluctantly, my eyes met his. What I saw there explained everything- the reason he had stayed away, why he had come to say good-bye. I can only describe what I saw by its effect on me. Every woman should be looked at in such a way, at least once in her life. With a longing that cannot be contained- with love that goes beyond mere feeling because it transforms and- like the verse of the poem he had read- it dissolves, as an offering, a gift. I felt my face flush and waves of knowing suffused every pore, every cell of my being. I was loved. And in that love, I felt beauty- my own, unrealized until that moment, suddenly rising to consciousness in a way that made everything in me come alive to the beauty all around me. Nothing more needed to be said.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “To give voice to the questions--- even in my own head--- would have been to give them power, to confirm the presence of doubt, to risk eventual downfall.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “Can you imagine? Fourteen-hundred-year-old views of history determining how neighbors interacted in the twentieth century? No. You can't. Because history here is a dead thing. Something captured in books that schoolchildren have to endure and which they forget about the moment the books are closed. In Pakistan, every conversation, however personal, is punctuated by the raspy, decrepit gasps of the past breathing down your neck; every generation has to fight out all the old arguments that have been fought before.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “When someone stops saying hello, I don't see that there's any need to say good-bye.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “That bond, the one between sisters—it is second only to the one between a mother and a daughter.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “She told me that he has always been like this. That he says anger is like milk. It doesn't keep. It becomes sour, bringing sickness and death to anyone who tastes it when its time has passed. Grief, she said he likes to say, ages better than anger. It is eternal.”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “The only way to rise above is to rise above. The”

  Nafisa Haji

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• “In poetry, words are meant to bypass our normal ways of understanding - to skip the mind altogether and pierce the heart.”

  Nafisa Haji

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