aku adalah angin...

as free as the wind...

Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts



"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this."

(Margaret Atwood)

Three Cups of Tea

a heartfelt song by Ms Wind sings along... (0)


"Haji Ali spoke. ‘If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Doctor Greg, you must take time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated but we are not stupid. We have lived and survived here for a long time.’ That day, Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I’ve ever learned in my life. We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly… Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them."

(Greg Mortensen)

The Only Son

a heartfelt song by Ms Wind sings along... (0)


“You thought yourself unique, and because you were, an army of your kind rose up to change the order of things."

(Stephane Audeguy)


"Miriam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Miriam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belongings."

(Khaled Hosseini)

April Fool's Day

a heartfelt song by Ms Wind sings along... (0)



"Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark."

(Bryce Courtenay)

Little Earthquakes

a heartfelt song by Ms Wind sings along... (0)



"She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer."

(Jennifer Weiner)



"I dropped my head into my arms. I could hear the sea vibrating, the tiny hiss of displaced sand and the click of stones. If I lay still and quiet enough, I thought, I could melt into this elemental world of sun, water and wide, open horizon."

(Elizabeth Buchan)

The Hours

a heartfelt song by Ms Wind sings along... (0)



"There is just this for consolation: an hour here or there, when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so."

(Michael Cunningham)

The Kite Runner

a heartfelt song by Ms Wind sings along... (0)



"When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal a wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched than stealing."

(Khaled Hosseini)

Before I Die

a heartfelt song by Ms Wind sings along... (0)


"I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he'd look at me the way boys do in films, as if I'm beautiful."

(Jenny Downham)

'Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.' - Cyril Connolly -