“I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. It was deep at night. I do not remember what time it was. I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything.”

— Zainab Salbi

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Zainab Salbi 11

Iraqi American author, women's rights activist 1969

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

Erika Jayne interview to CR Fashion Book https://www.crfashionbook.com/fashion/a19743941/erika-jayne-pretty-mess-real-housewives-fashion/ (2018)

“I thought, ‘This is just too terrifying. I’ve never seen anything like that before.’ I hadn’t been allowed to watch horror movies before that. I was so traumatized I literally could not sleep for weeks, and it changed my physical appearance; I lost like 10 pounds. My teachers got so concerned they called my mother, ‘Is there something going on – is she being abused at home?’ My mother found a picture of Robert Englund the actor, and Robert Englund in the Freddy Krueger make-up, and pasted them up near my bedside table. So, every night when I’d go to sleep, literally for like a year, I’d have to look at it and think, ‘It’s just a movie, it’s just a movie, it’s not real.’ I remember thinking that I was going to grow up one day, and be an actress and never make a movie that scares little kids.”

Monica Keena (1979) American actress

Discussing A Nightmare on Elm Street in Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010)

“When I look out my window,
Many sights to see.
And when I look in my window,
So many different people to be…”

Donovan (1946) Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist

Sunshine Superman (1966), Season Of The Witch

“My room overlooks the park and yesterday during the afternoon I'd opened up all the blinds and taken back the curtains so I could look out over the park. Come nightfall, I was grooving to some rap record in my room, bopping around the room for maybe half an hour. I don't know what I was doing, just messing around…and at one stage I looked out of the window and there were about 200 people looking up, clapping, applauding my dancing. That was funny.”

The Edge (1961) Irish rock musician, guitar player of U2

On dancing

“We went on the day on the boat train. I was 7, I had never seen a ship before. It looked very big. Everybody was very excited. We went down to the cabin and that's when my mother said to my father that she had made up her mind quite firmly that she would not go to bed in that ship. She would sit up at night. She decided that she wouldn't go to bed at night and she didn't!" I saw that ship sink, "I never closed my eyes. I didn't sleep at all. I saw it, I heard it, and nobody could possibly forget it." "I can remember the colours, the sounds, everything," she said. "The worst thing I can remember are the screams." "It seemed as if once everybody had gone, drowned, finished, the whole world was standing still. There was nothing, just this deathly, terrible silence in the dark night with the stars overhead." The band played one version of 'Nearer My God to Thee' of which there are three and the one they played was the one that was played in church."”

Eva Hart (1905–1996) Titanic survivor

"I never closed my eyes at all – I saw that ship sink. And I saw that ship break in half.
Interview from 1993, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD5J43Z9AWI, quoted in New York Times, 16 February 1996

“Night and day I've been most intensely thinking about my painting, and I have been more or less satisfied with everything I've done. I'm slacking a little now, not working as much, and no longer so satisfied. But all in all, I still have a loftier and happier perspective on my art than I did in Worpswede. But it does demand a very, very great deal of me – working and sleeping in the same room with my paintings is a delight... When I wake up in the middle of the night, I jump out of bed and look at my work. And in the morning it's the first thing I see..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter from Paris, 15 May 1906 to Otto Modersohn in Worpswede; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 204
1906 + 1907

“I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 271).
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

“.. when I had my imaginary friend I would look out of the small glass panes of the window and fill them with steam. Then, I would draw a little window and go out through it. Opposite our house, there was a milk store that was named Pinzon, and I would travel from the little window through the "o" in Pinzon, and from there into the center of the earth, where I had my friend, and we would dance and play... I do not remember my friend's house, and she had no name. She was like me in age. She had no face. The truth is, I do not remember if she had a face or not, and she was very lively. I could not describe her.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

9 September 1950
Source: 1946 - 1953, "Song of herself"; interviews by Olga Campos, Sept. 1950, Chapter 'My life', pp. 66-67

“I caught sight of my reflection;
I caught it in the window.
I saw the darkness in my heart;
I saw the signs of my undoing.
They had been there from the start,
And the darkness still has work to do.
The knotted chord's untying.
They're heated and they're holy.
Oh they're sitting there on high.
So secure with everything they're buying.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Blood of Eden
Song lyrics, Us (1992)

“I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

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Zainab Salbi 11

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