Quotes by Iraqi Authors

The pleasure I found in reading books was disconcerting...I felt anxious about every new piece of information. I would latch onto one particular detail and start look for references and other versions of it in other writings. I remembered, for example, that for quite some time I tracked down the subject of kissing. I read and read and felt dizzy with the subject, as if I had eaten a psychotropic fruit.
Hassan Blasim
I have two ways of loving You: A selfish one And another way that is worthy of You. In my selfish love, I remember You and You alone. In that other love, You lift the veil And let me feast my eyes on Your living face.
Rabia Al-Adawiyya
In politics, a conflict only exists in public; otherwise it is merely a potential for conflict, which we can never be certain exists or will materialize.
Kanan Makiya
The dead, Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, as you know.
Hassan Blasim
It happened so quickly. One minute I was plucking the flower, and the next I was in his chariot immersed in darkness. I struggled to wrench myself free from his grasp and run away. I twisted as far as I could, hoping to see mother chasing after me. But ahead of me, behind me, on either side of me, everywhere I looked, all I could see was darkness.
Tamara Agha-Jaffar
You cruel, hard-hearted gods!” I flung the goblet in his direction. Hermes barely had time to dart out of its way before it hit the wall and shattered to small pieces. “You’re all the same! Hsst! Jealous! Vindictive! That’s what you are! You allow yourselves to take pleasure with any mortal you wish. Let a goddess do the same. Let a goddess choose a mortal for her lover, and you set off in a fury of revenge against her as if her actions are an affront to you. And all the while, you male gods allow yourselves all kinds of liberties you deny to us females.
Tamara Agha-Jaffar
A secret is a truth, hiding behind a mouth.
Ahmad Albayati
I think that after a revolution a man needs a few years to get used to the new era. I knew from my limited and worthless experience that those who tear down and destroy one era cannot build another. Just as weapons can't suddenly become flowers, a killer can't suddenly turn gardener. Hasan-i Tofan, a killer and an earlier member of "The Finishing-Off Sports Club
Bakhtiyar Ali
I like to call a spade a spade in politics and in everything else. That's why the zionists and the americans...The top officials hate Saddam Hussein.The White House is lying once again. He's a liar.He's the world's number one liar.He said there were chemical weapons in Iraq, and that Iraq is connected with terrorism.Later he declared: 'We didn't find any of this in Iraq.'What I want to say is that he also declared that what Saddam Hussein says is not true...This is defamation of your president of thirty five years.
Saddam Hussein
It is much easier to condemn Islam and 'oppressive Muslim men' than to unpack the intricate relationships between global politics related to empire building and capitalist expansion as well as regional and national struggles revolving around political and economic power and resources.
Nadje Al-Ali
Wisdomis in the insane asylums.The endis in the everyday-pale smiles
Saif Alsaegh
The single thing all women need in the world is inspiration, and inspiration comes from storytelling.
Zainab Salbi
Do not wait for the tide to take you, my boy. Instead, you take on the tide
Ahmad Ardalan
There's no need to kick him in the balls for him to tell the story honestly and impartially, because the dead are usually honest, even the bastards among them.
Hassan Blasim
When a people has no translations and is unable to promote its culture, it does not exist.
Bakhtyar Ali
Writing about memories is an elusive process. It often begins with a good intention: to convey the truth. What happens in reality is that we only write down what passes through the censors' eyes. The censors here are the ambient time and space, social and political conditions, and the psychological changers the writer herself. What one writes now is certainly not what actually happened. It is but a vague indicator of what might have happened, a mixture of illusive and contracted images, a dream, or an act conditioned by either a denial or a desire to see past events shaped by what is yearned for in the present. p. 153
Haifa Zangana
Facing a deteriorating economy and a weakening hold over the populace, the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein opted to revitalize tribal leaders and conservative practices as a means of stabilizing state power; those conservative practices were not an inherent feature of a predominantly Muslim country.
Nadje Al-Ali
Military intervention cannot liberate women because it is embedded within a set of assumptions, beliefs, and social relations that reinforce and reproduce gender inequality, as well as other social inequalities within and across nation-states. Military intervention depends upon a belief in the legitimacy of armed violence in resolving political problems, which in turn depends upon our adherence to particular ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman.
Nadje Al-Ali
In the beginning, science is a thing imagined; in the beginning, war is a thing imagined; in the beginning, love is a thing imagined; in the beginning, even God is a thing imagined. There is nothing that has not first been imagined. Even before there are words, there is imagination.
Bakhtiyar Ali
Everything in this world is the fruit of the imagination. If there is no imaginary garden in our head, we can't plant a real one.
Bakhtiyar Ali
The operation would be in a week...I didn't know if I would survive. How I longed to go back to reading! There was nowhere I longed to be more than the university campus. I was preparing for a master's on fantasy literature. I was interested in why the country's literature did not include this distinctive genre. I had this great passion for studying and writing, which they explained in my household with the story of the umbilical cord. When I was born, and at my father's request, my elder sister buried my umbilical cord in the courtyard of her primary school. My father attributed my {brother's} academic failure to the fact that my mother buried his umbilical cord in the garden of our house.
Hassan Blasim
Everything can be taken from you in a second, but the human spirit is so strong. War can teach you so much about evil, and so much about good.
Zainab Salbi
I have made You the companion of my heart.But my body is available to those who desire its company,And my body is friendly toward its guest,But the Beloved of my heart is the guest of my soul. 
Rabia Al-Adawiyya
Two people, one city, different times; connected by a memoir. Can love exist in a city destined for decades of misery?
Ahmad Ardalan
Love and peace are not just words, they are a way of life. And in an honest living, love will always conquer.
Ahmad Ardalan
I don’t recall ever seeing my mother as a human being. She would always be weeping and wailing in the corner of the kitchen like a dog tied up to be tormented. My father would assail her with a hail of insults, and when her endurance broke, she would whine aloud, ‘Why good Lord? Why? Take me and save me.’ Only then would my father stand up, take the cord out of his headdress, and whip her nonstop for half an hour, spitting at her throughout.
Hassan Blasim
In love, nothing exists between heart and heart.Speech is born out of longing,True description from the real taste.The one who tastes, knows;the one who explains, lies.How can you describe the true form of SomethingIn whose presence you are blotted out?And in whose being you still exist?And who lives as a sign for your journey?
Rabia Al-Adawiyya
Do the roots reveal everything to the branches, or do they keep what is painful to themselves?
Sinan Antoon
The participation if women in some armies in the world is in reality only symbolic. The talk about the role of Zionist women in fighting with the combat units of the enemy in the war of 5 June 1967 was intended more as propaganda than anything real or substantial. It was calculated to intensify and compound the adverse psychological effects of the war by exploiting the backward outlook of large sections of Arab society and their role in the community. The intention was to achieve adverse psychological effects by saying to Arabs that they were defeated, in 1967, by women.
Saddam Hussein
And I withdrew into myself when I understood that they wanted to extract every thought in my head, one by one, like decayed teeth.
Alia Mamdouh
Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.
Saddam Hussein
On January 17, 1991 and for the 43 days that followed, I watched CNN’s live coverage of SCUD missiles and bombs fall over Baghdad like rain; then the 12 ½ years of unjust sanctions that killed approximately a million Iraqis, half of which were children under the age of five; then an unjust attack in 2003 that opened the borders to terrorists from all over the world and reduced the cradle of civilization to piles of rubble. The gov. asked us to support their plan or else be considered anti-American and undemocratic and they ask of us the same today, 25 years later, even though history proved they were pro-profit not pro-life.
Weam Namou
Iraq is a fabricated state that has failed. It has always been a failure. It exists on the map. On the map, it has some borders, but these borders weren’t drawn naturally.
Masrour Barzani
Dreams are often dangerous.Those endowed with an imagination don't run a way from this world, They think about the fate of all its creatures. They worry even about the flowers and the ants. But someone with a dream wants to make everyone service his dream.Ghazalnus
Bakhtiyar Ali
You asked if I loved her? I can't even whisper her name, my heart would burst out of my chest.
Ahmad Ardalan
An hour later. the moon reflected its light on the Tigris as well. The sun, the moon, and Fatima. What else could I ask for?
Ahmad Ardalan
I know a feeling like that only comes once in a lifetime, and I think you should follow your heart’s desires. I believe in love, and I know love conquers all.
Ahmad Ardalan
The source of my suffering and loneliness is deep in my heart. This is a disease no doctor can cure. Only Union with the Friend can cure it.
Rabia Basri
My first-year mentor Leslie taught me that the hurrieder we go, the behinder we get.
Weam Namou
The people who encouraged you to change will oftentimes, after you change, accuse you of having changed.
Weam Namou
I really like you better aimless and lost among people, a little crazy, oddball, not looking like yourself. So that I don't know you at all and the nearer I get to you the more you separate yourself from me-- I get dizzy trying to follow you and I have to work really hard-- and that's what I want!
Alia Mamdouh