The Most Beautiful Things Said by Ghada Al-Samman

The Most Beautiful Words of Ghada Al-Samman on the Pain of Separation

Here are some of Ghada Al-Samman’s most poignant reflections on the agony of parting:

1. We are two lonely wolves, deeply saddened by the hunger of children for a warm bedtime story… yet… there is no one.
2. This is my fate with you: to not live our story… but to write it.
3. Are shells the journals of the drowned… and is that why pearls develop within some of them?
4. When I contemplate our inevitable separation, tears flow for a long time, gasping in sorrow… in sorrow, in sorrow, in sorrow.
5. You are a dagger buried in the flesh of my memories.
6. How tragic it is that old age has become a desire.
7. The essence of death is that we know others and continue to live alongside them; death is the faces around us when the masks fall away.
8. From the ashes, I gather my soul and try to reincarnate myself, to live once more.
9. Who weaves this yearning for you within the depths of my soul, oh you who are both distant and close.
10. Dreams are painful.
11. I have lived a thousand years of boredom and alienation; yet, when I gaze into your eyes, my autumn unfurls from a bud.
12. I was strange with you, strange without you, and will remain strange forever with you.
13. I was furious because he insisted I play the role of the woman as he imagines… he goes to his job… while I head to my kitchen.
14. Your absence kills me, and your presence does too; for it is a threshold to a new absence.
15. Why, after you taught me to live with an illusion, and I live you as a dream… have you returned to seek my essence and reality?
16. While in my homeland, I cried for the longing to depart into exile, and today I cry because I have fulfilled my dreams.
17. Do not try to take your tree with you into exile to enjoy its shade, for trees do not migrate.
18. That subtle pain without a name or justification pierces through my bones with its fleeting, searing moments.
19. I was filled with you, content, and satisfied, but our time was perforated… the sands of joy slipping away quickly.

The Most Beautiful Words of Ghada Al-Samman on Sadness and Grief

Here are some of Ghada Al-Samman’s most profound thoughts on sadness and grief:

1. I boarded many trains… and I was mistaken to think that I would find a path that would not lead me to you.
2. I will grow above my pains… and spread like grass within the soil of others’ suffering.
3. It is truly sad to not belong to yourself, living in a performance for others.
4. Each of us now desires to be the whole world of the other, fully aware that this is impossible.
5. I am the eternal fool; once again, I brought the bear to my vineyard, and am astonished that it tramples my clusters.
6. We are always blind when it comes to what is within our reach, always searching for it in the distance, losing twice.
7. I become increasingly convinced that the drawbacks of freedom of thought are lesser than those of its suppression.
8. I am a tightly sealed coincidence, yet easily opened upon request.
9. How harsh is alienation for one who has no jasmine flower or memory of jasmine.
10. Men whom we fail to forget are few, yet if one glides through the page of the soul, he marks it forever with his imprint.
11. You still dwell beneath my skin.
12. What can I say to you while I consume my memories like poisoned bread at the tables of parting?
13. My tragedy is that my love is both insightful and mad, yet it sees clearly.
14. I sigh for you, oh stranger.
15. The madman who returns to us to impart his experience is like a half-seer guiding the blind through the depths of human truth.
16. Our tragedy, my beloved, is that we lived our love rather than perform it… farewell, oh stranger… and farewell, oh self.
17. The phenomenon of alienation taught me more than any other teacher how to write the name of the homeland in stars on the night’s blackboard.
18. Yet I sincerely confess with a heavy heart that I truly loved you once; had it not been for the crutch of letters, I would have broken before you.
19. Don’t tell me that we parted because I left… our meeting has now turned into separation.

The Most Beautiful Words of Ghada Al-Samman on Love

Below are some of Ghada Al-Samman’s most beautiful sentiments on love:

1. When I evoke you and write about you, the pen in my hand transforms into a red rose.
2. This entire lifetime is not enough for me to express how much I love you.
3. I truly reside only in your eyes.
4. With you, I have built a house of spider silk… yet I have discovered the meaning of stability.
5. Oh, take my heart and bite it like an apple, but do not imprison me within a closed circle.
6. Is this truly you… as I observe you and search for you within you, yet I find you not.
7. I did not realize until tonight that your tears are colored and that the blood flowing in your veins has the colors of the rainbow.
8. Your eyes are my destiny… no one escapes their fate.
9. I caught myself red-handed in loving you, like a little girl stealing a loaf of kindness.
10. I will not be yours, and in order to deepen your pain, I will not belong to anyone else either.
11. I bid you farewell and return to my letters, wrapping them like a bandage around the broken parts of my days, as disappointment stands alone as my crutch in the journey of forgetfulness.
12. Where were you that evening when I watched the last matchstick in the world go out, and I was alone.
13. Oh you, distant like a childhood memory, yet close like my breaths and thoughts, I love you and shout in the fullness of my silence: I love you.
14. Oh you misfortunate one… had you not loved me, I could have wiped your image from my eyes… just as I wipe the steam from the glass of remembrance.
15. I learned the language of silence for your sake, so as not to reproach you, and bitterly say: You have… let me down.
16. My eternal hell is that I have known myself, and I have known you.
17. Your love is a distilled happiness, your joys blessed within my heart that knows not the folly of jealousy; only death stirs my jealousy when it claims you.
18. Your love for me is hypothetical, your fidelity to me is also hypothetical; only my hypothetical death is as real as breathing.
19. Do not ask me where I was during our separation… when you are absent, I cannot be.
20. My love is not a seat in a public park that you leave whenever you please and return to as you wish.
21. My beloved has left his fingerprints on the night, and thus the stars were born.
22. The sorrow of mature lovers is unlike any sorrow in its depth.
23. There is nothing more active than the imagination of a woman who feels jealous.
24. Since I have given you everything like a child, I still possess so much more.
25. Because I seek no one, I was astonished to find you.

The Most Beautiful Words of Ghada Al-Samman on Life Experiences

Here are some of Ghada Al-Samman’s most insightful thoughts on life experiences:

1. I would leave a fragment of my energy for joy, yearning, and waiting in every city.
2. How delightful it is to have an unknown in life that we strive towards, one we return to when the falsehoods appear in their true light.
3. No… do not hate them… for hatred is an acknowledgment of the existence of the loathed, and it does not feel their presence at all.
4. Do not betray your life; smile, for you are alive.
5. Sick with life, ill from the horrors surrounding me, and if they were to place me in an X-ray room and take a picture of my chest, they would find a homeland crying within.
6. Your name remains the only name forbidden from being declined in my life.
7. I do not care if you repeat words without novelty in language, but I can distinguish the pulse and spark of words.
8. Because we master silence, they have burdened us with the weight of intentions.
9. You are not the end of the line on the last line of a previous page; you are a rare word on a new line in a fresh, white page.
10. I have learned year after year how to transform from an Arab woman into winds that are not confined by bars.
11. Grief has taken its toll on me, yet I will not bear the burden of despair.
12. I have become aware of each of my deaths through you, and I will think of you tenderly as I face my final death.
13. The fish will not forgive you for siding with the stagnant pond, in defiance of the sea.
14. If only you felt the glow of silence… if only you could hear the weeping of silence and its pleading, you would have torn apart… you would understand my tragedy.
15. Would that we create life before we create eternity.
16. There is no being in existence worthy of granting me the joy of triumph over my defeat.
17. How sweet are the words we do not utter when we feel that letters cannot encapsulate our emotions.
18. How difficult it is to remain silent about parting when a continent of reproach stands between us.
19. It may be necessary for some questions to remain unanswered, so we can continue living, striving, and searching.
20. Your cruelty was your sin… and my pride was my sin.
21. You deceived me by claiming I was the capital of your heart… only to discover that I was a neglected suburb within its periphery.
22. All who attempted to kill me honed their knives on the word “I love you.”
23. Who denies that alienation is a borrowed life?
24. Each moment is a fingerprint… never to be repeated.
25. I know that ships at the dock complain of boredom, but those that sail lament alienation, bearing witness that the season for migration has arrived.