Quotes by Palestinian Authors

We are both preachers. He preached the teaching of Jesus Christ, and I preached my philosophy.He asked me: “Do you pray?”“No.”“Do you beseech God to forgive your trespasses?”“No.”“Do you not thank God for his bounty?”“No.”“Do you not depend on God's support?”“No.”And with this his puzzlement increased until he was assured that my fate lies in hell indeed.
Khalil al-Sakakini
We’ll start with an easy one, shall we? What is the secant of three pi?” The troll asked. “Pie?” Toru felt suddenly hungry. “What are you talking about, man, have you gone senile? A sea camp? You mean like the floating city?
Noor Al-Shanti
Under the broken promises of superpowers and under the worlds indifference to spilled Arab blood.
Susan Abulhawa
Be What You Want To Be,Not Who Others Wants To See
Noor Marwan
Would words shatter the immensity of life and death so close to one another?
Susan Abulhawa
The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys.
Susan Abulhawa
... mother seemed happy because the school yard where Rafik would spend his recesses was surrounded by a high stone wall. She'd recently started talking about 'safety' in a way that made Liyana jumpy. Liyana never thought about safety unless someone else brought it up. She didn't WANT to think about it either. SHE WANTED TO LIVE IN AN UNLOCKED WORLD
Naomi Shibab Nye
My drop of sweat is the only way I could ever float.
Noor Sliman
I am forever yearning for ice cream.And cats. Lots and lots of cats.
Noor Ashour
Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?
Susan Abulhawa
In Damascus:poems become diaphanousThey’re neither sensualnor intellectualthey are what echo saysto echo . . .
Mahmoud Darwish
...We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.
Ghada Karmi
exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.
Edward Said
I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division say, of men into "us" (Westerners) and "they" (Orientals). For such divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and some other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends.
Edward Said
human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with "other" cultures.
Edward Said
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.
Edward Said
I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity...On September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father's life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved.
Susan Abulhawa
This division is not one by religious affiliation, rather it separates the extremists and the peace-loving people.Therefor I'm optimistic: now a humanistic Islam is getting shaken awake. Moderate Islam needs now to finally break cover and explain how to deal with the violence-glorifying parts of the Quran. The (psychological) repression that this has nothing to do with our belief doesn't work anymore. We have to face this challenge.
Mouhanad Khorchide
The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.
Edward Said
Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.
Refaat Alareer
Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand.
Susan Abulhawa
I feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power.
Susan Abulhawa
We can't just run away. It's our land. Our people. We have a duty.
Selma Dabbagh
Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.
Mahmoud Darwish
There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.
Refaat Alareer
In contexts of colonial oppression, intellectuals, especially those who advocate and work for justice, cannot be just-or mere- intellectuals, in the abstract sense; they cannot but be immersed in some form or another of activism, to learn from fellow activists through real-life experiences, to widen the horizons of their sources of inspiration, and to organically engage in effective, collective emancipatory processes, without the self-indulgence, complacency, or ivory-towerness that might otherwise blur their moral vision. In short, to be just intellectuals, committed to justice as the most ethical and durable foundation of peace.
Omar Barghouti
In response to this fatal alliance of savage capitalism in the West with Israeli racism, exclusion and colonial subjugation, the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel presents not only a progressive, anti racist [3], sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil non-violent resistance, but also a real chance of becoming the political catalyst and moral anchor for a strengthened, reinvigorated international social movement capable of reaffirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality and dignity and the right of nations to self determination.
Omar Barghouti
Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.
Susan Abulhawa
Amal,I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow, parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell.
Susan Abulhawa
Tragedy cannot be the end of our lives. We cannot allow it to control and defeat us.
Izzeldin Abuelaish
...you shouldn’t hate something you don’t know, because it may turn out to be the bearer of your greatest good fortune.
Izzeldin Abuelaish
You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion.
Susan Abulhawa
Put it on record--I am an ArabAnd the number of my card is fifty thousandI have eight childrenAnd the ninth is due after summer.What's there to be angry about?Put it on record.--I am an ArabWorking with comrades of toil in a quarry.I have eight childernFor them I wrest the loaf of bread,The clothes and exercise booksFrom the rocksAnd beg for no alms at your doors,--Lower not myself at your doorstep.--What's there to be angry about?Put it on record.--I am an Arab.I am a name without a tide,Patient in a country where everythingLives in a whirlpool of anger.--My roots--Took hold before the birth of time--Before the burgeoning of the ages,--Before cypess and olive trees,--Before the proliferation of weeds.My father is from the family of the plough--Not from highborn nobles.And my grandfather was a peasant--Without line or genealogy.My house is a watchman's hut--Made of sticks and reeds.Does my status satisfy you?--I am a name without a surname.Put it on Record.--I am an Arab.Color of hair: jet black.Color of eyes: brown.My distinguishing features:--On my head the 'iqal cords over a keffiyeh--Scratching him who touches it.My address:--I'm from a village, remote, forgotten,--Its streets without name--And all its men in the fields and quarry.--What's there to be angry about?Put it on record.--I am an Arab.You stole my forefathers' vineyards--And land I used to till,--I and all my childern,--And you left us and all my grandchildren--Nothing but these rocks.--Will your government be taking them too--As is being said?So!--Put it on record at the top of page one:--I don't hate people,--I trespass on no one's property.And yet, if I were to become starved--I shall eat the flesh of my usurper.--Beware, beware of my starvation.--And of my anger!
Mahmoud Darwish
I come to listen to your pain and to hear the stories and memories of a few obsessed citizens. Jerusalem, I come to you in disguise: in over-colourful, immodest clothes and vulgar make-up... The only way I could come to you was in disguise, as a whore.
Suad Amiry
I am a physician, and as a consequence I see things most clearly in medical terms. I am arguing that we need an immunization program, one that injects people with respect, dignity, and equality. One that inoculates them against hatred.
Izzeldin Abuelaish
Sometimes people carried anger around for years, in a secret box inside their bodies, and it grew tighter like a hardening knot. The problem with it getting tighter and smaller was that the people did, too, hiding it. Liyana had seen this happen even in elementary school. Somebody wasn't fair to somebody and the hurt person just held it in. By the end of the year they had nearly disappeared. But other people responded differently. They let their anger grow so large it ate them up – even their voices and laughter. And still they couldn't get rid of it. They forgot where it had come from. They tried to shake it loose, but no one liked them by now.Liyana wondered if the person who could let it out the same size it was to begin with, was luckiest.In Jerusalem, so much old anger floated around, echoed from fading graffiti, seeped out of cracks. Sometimes it bumped into new anger in the streets. The air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names.
Naomi Shibab Nye
Anger and violence in Gaza and among Gazans is completely predictable. In a situation like ours, the absence of violence and anger would be abnormal. All of of us feel angry at least occasionally.
Izzeldin Abuelaish
Always" is a good word to believe in.
Susan Abulhawa
I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her.
Susan Abulhawa
Thank you,’ I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. “May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift”; “Beauty is in the eyes that find me pretty”; “May Allah never deny your prayer”; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere “thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful.” (169).
Susan Abulhawa
The mercy bulletI envy horses: if they break a leg and feel humiliated because they can no longer charge back and forth in the wind, they are cured by a mercy bullet. So if something in me gets broken, physically or spiritually, I would do well to look for a proficient killer, even if he is one of my enemies. I will pay him a fee and the price of the bullet, kiss his hand and his revolver, and if I am able to write, extol him in a poem of rare beauty, for which he can choose the metre and rhyme.
Mahmoud Darwish
How fate is stubborn and holds to habit.
Susan Abulhawa
What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?
Lila Abu-Lughod
frThe Spirit comes gently and makes himself known by his fragrance. He is not felt as a burden for God is light, very light. Rays of light and knowledge stream before him as the Spirit approaches. The Spirit comes with the tenderness of a true friend to save, to heal, to teach, to counsel, to strengthen, and to console.
Cyril of Jerusalem
Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.
Edward Said
When it comes to Jews, you have a two-thousand-year memory, but when it comes to us Palestinians, you have a sixty-year amnesia.
Suad Amiry
I loved her in spite of myself. I loved her immeasurably.Infinitely. And I feared that love as much as I feared my own fury at theworld.
Susan Abulhawa
She loved beyond measure, When I was young I thought her cold. But in time I came to understand that she was too tender for the world she’d been born into,” I said. Sorrow gave Dalia an iron gift. Behind that hard shelter, sheloved boundlessly in the distance and privacy of her solitude, safe fromthe tragic rains of her fate.
Susan Abulhawa
What amazes me most is that we, as a people, have shared our collective story of being thrown out of our homeland, Palestine, with each other and with many others- actually we have bored the world with this collective story- but somehow the individual Palestinian shies away, or perhaps is too afraid, to share the very personal story of being thrown out of her or his home, living room, or bedroom. These personal stories are seldom told, not even to our own children, perhaps not even to ourselves. I guess the wound remains open.
Suad Amiry
the reverse side of love is unbearable loss.
Susan Abulhawa
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them asingle word: Home.
Mahmoud Darwish
To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.
Edward Said
Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal. For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media.
Edward Said
Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician.Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there.Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16.A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death.A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you.Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.
Suheir Hammad
We're all born with the greatest treasures we'll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart.
Susan Abulhawa
Every day I thank God for giving me a little kind heart which bears this life
Ahlam Salhab
Peace can happen in 24 hours....just like war can happen in 24 hours.
Sari Nusseibeh
To Alef, the letterthat begins the alphabetsof both Arabic and Hebrew-two Semitic languages,sisters for centuries.May we find the languagethat takes usto the only home there is - one another's hearts....Alef knowsThat a threadOf a storyStitches togetherA wound.
Ibtisam Barakat
No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).
Edward Said
Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
Edward Said