layalielsayfeh

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Ithra

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We walk the same path, some farther along, some farther back, but still and for ever more the same path.

— Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds (The Malazan Book of the Fallen, #8)

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Barcelona sunset and dusk

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15th century Timurid Qur'an copied on Chinese paper from the Ming Dynasty.

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You have to live to really know things, my love... I think one begins to feel when things aren’t important. I’m not sure how to put it. When you’ve spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you’ve had only half that number of years of experience. You know what the room and the people in it probably hold for you and you go looking for it. If it’s not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn’t, and how little time there is to learn the difference.

Hyperion, Dan Simmons

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Gothic Quarter and Criança mural, Barcelona

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Castle District, Budapest

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But human beings [...] bury their gold and silver [...] in the ground [...] all tokens of violence and discord...

Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, On Love of the Poor, 16; translated by Brian E. Daley, S.J.

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...we live in splendid houses, adorned brightly with stones of every color, glittering with gold and silver and mosaics and colored paintings, deceptive allurements for the eyes!

Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, On Love of the Poor, 16; translated by Brian E. Daley, S.J.

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District V

St. Stephen's Basilica

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Birds flying at night over the Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest

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I heard you in the other room asking your mother: “Mama, am I a Palestinian?” When she answered “Yes”, a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, it’s noise exploding, then silence.

Afterwards… I heard you crying. I could not move. There was something bigger than my awareness being born in the other room through your bewildered sobbing. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you… I was unable to move to see what was happening in the other room. I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again; hills, plains, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child… Do not believe that man grows. No; he is born suddenly - a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood on to the ruggedness of the road.

Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories (translated by Hilary Kilpatrick)

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Budapest morning stroll

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the beach made things feel better 🌊

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“You ask: What is the meaning of refugee? They will say: One who is uprooted from his homeland. You ask: What is the meaning of homeland? They will say: The house, the mulberry tree, the chicken coop, the beehive, the smell of bread, and the first sky. You ask: Can a word of eight letters be big enough for all of these, yet too small for us?”

— Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence (via palestinasim)

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View from A'DAM Lookout