Recitation Quotes

“Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions... Qur'anic reciters chant long phrases for meditation. It is natural for the audience to adjust their breathing too and find that this has a calming, therapeutic effect, which enables them to grasp the more elusive teachings of the text.”

“Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.”

“The recitation of grievances was strange balm.”

“Prayer is not simply a soliloquy, a mere exercise in therapeutic self-analysis, or a religious recitation. Prayer is discourse with the personal God Himself.”

“But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.”

“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”

“My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.”

“There are many reasons our prayers may lack power. Sometimes they become routine. Our prayers become hollow when we say similar words in similar ways over and over so often that the words become more of a recitation than a communication.”

“Religion is also a process of healing, I discovered – a healing of the soul. Even our language points to this relation. The words ‘holy’, ‘wholesome’ and ‘healing’ all have the same root. (In German, this is even more striking: heilig, heil and heilen.) Muslims believe that all humans are born in a state of purity, our fitra, and it is only in the course of our lives that we tarnish our soul through bad habits and wrong behaviour. Through spiritual practices such as prayer, recitation of Quran and dhikr we can cleanse these acquired ‘black spots’ in our soul and return towards our original primordial nature. More so, dhikr is said to enliven the heart.”