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"We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right."
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"The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped."
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Personal Development
"It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality."
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Personal Development
"It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces."
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Personal Development
"But alas, the world is not a wish-granting factory."
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Personal Development
"You cannot change reality by ignoring it."
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Personal Development
"The reality about life is that challenges are inevitable."
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Personal Development
"I don't know why everyoneis still trying to find out whether heaven and hell exist.Why do we need more evidence?They exist here on this very Earth.Heaven is standing atop Mount Qasiounoverlooking the Damascene sightswith the wind carrying Qabbani'sdulcet words all around you.And hell is only four hours away in Aleppo where children's cries drown out the explosions of mortar bombsuntil they lose their voice,their families, and their limbs.Yes, hell certainly does existright now, at this moment,as I pen this poem. And all we're doingto extinguish this hellfireis sighing, shrugging, liking, and sharing.Tell me: what exactly does that makeus? Are we any better than the gatekeepers of hell?"
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Personal Development
"Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations."
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Personal Development
"Everything that looks too perfect is too perfect to be perfect."
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Personal Development
"It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake."
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Personal Development
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"It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades."
Health
"But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else."
Sociology
"I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it."
Life
"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is."
Truth
"Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt."
Character
"To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better."
Art
"AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them."
Awareness
"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
Art
"In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it."
Art
"To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune."
Art
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