courage never betrayed you, and your hope never failed even in the darkest hours; in the look of your two noble eyes I could see deep meanings of sorrow mingled with faith and hope and expectation. I would see them smiling at you with my eyes while I wept with all my being and my heart. And you accepted your fate with beautiful patience and rare courage.

You were the soul soaring in wide, radiant skies. You loved to add to your merits, to adorn your qualities, and to widen the horizon of your thought. Even now there rings in my ears the tone of your sweet voice — in which there was something of the hymns of the angels — saying: I want to widen my horizon.

How your leaping spirit longed for renewal and growth, how it savored art and music! You never knew idleness or stillness for a single day.

O Salwa! You of the noble heart and the luminous mind: has the light truly gone out, has the surging vitality been stilled, have the beautiful voice and the smiling face gone?

How cruel the fates are when they strike! I watched you on your last day drawing to your end, but I could not believe it — or my heart made me unable to see.

Your passage through this life was brief, like a gleaming dream that sang of the greatness of life and its virtues and soon vanished, leaving behind many impressions and traces, laden and brimming with memories of good things...

Is it true, beloved Salwa, that nothing remains of you but the memory? A sweet and bitter memory to accompany me until my destiny is united with yours?

From the Sayings of Salwa
Salwa Mahmasani Moumina

• In this renaissance to which we aspire, we need a cultured, building generation, other than the old generation; and none can give it to the homeland but a woman emancipated, cultured, and generous, who has cast off the shackle of the past and come forward with courage, strength, and competence to prepare the means of awakening and advancement.

* * *

• Every individual — man or woman — who enters upon marriage must know that it is a sacred bond, and a path to a paradise purified of selfish interests, in which hatred, rancor, and egoism melt away, and in which love, fidelity, sacrifice, and selflessness live. If the bond of marriage is honored and surrounded with the respect it deserves, the tower of the family is sheltered from collapse, and the rising generation is preserved from confusion and anxiety, and guarded against the pessimism and delusion that blacken before its sight the fields of struggle; then the paths of noble deeds open out before it, and personalities come forward with their limitless possibilities and their unconquerable energies.

* * *

• In the heart of each of us is a spark of hope with which God has graced us as a blessing, with which we face calamities... so that even when the blow is a thunderbolt, hope lights up in man's imagination to divert him, or to make him forget, or to plant doubt in his heart so that he will not believe what has happened, for a stretch of time that sometimes lasts to the end of life.

* * *

• Often the torrents of misfortune sweep human powers down to the abyss of extinction; the wicked man is only a man whom society neglected, so that he sank into crime and his humanity was lost.

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