Tawfik Saabi > Tawfik's Quotes

“Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I heard you in the other room asking your mother, 'Mama, am I a Palestinian?' When she answered 'Yes' a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then - silence. Afterwards...I heard you crying. I could not move. There was something bigger than my awareness being born in the other room through your bewildered sobbing. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you...I was unable to move to see what was happening in the other room. I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child...Do you believe that man grows? No, he is born suddenly - a word, a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood onto the ruggedness of the road.”
― Ghassan Kanafani

“Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit”
― Edward Said

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“I’ve never cared for humming verse
But what to do inside a jail?
I’ll hum some verse to pass long days
I’ll hum and wait till freedom comes.”
― Hồ Chí Minh, Poems from the Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh

“To reap a return in ten years, plant trees. To reap a return in 100, cultivate the people.”
― Ho Chi Minh

“Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings.

I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Tired of his lack of understanding, she asked him for an unusual birthday gift: that for one day he would take care of the domestic chores. He accepted in amusement, and indeed took charge of the house at dawn. He served a splendid breakfast, but he forgot that fried eggs did not agree with her and that she did not drink café con leche. Then he ordered a birthday luncheon for eight guests and gave instructions for tidying the house, and he tried so hard to manage better than she did that before noon he had to capitulate without a trace of embarrassment. From the first moment he realized he did not have the slightest idea where anything was, above all in the kitchen, and the servants let him upset everything to find each item, for they were playing the game too. At ten o’clock no decisions had been made regarding lunch because the housecleaning was not finished yet, the bedroom was not straightened, the bathroom was not scrubbed; he forgot to replace the toilet paper, change the sheets, and send the coachmen for the children, and he confused the servants’ duties: he told the cook to make the beds and set the chambermaids to cooking. At eleven o’clock, when the guests were about to arrive, the chaos in the house was such that Fermina Daza resumed command, laughing out loud, not with the triumphant attitude she would have liked but shaken instead with compassion for the domestic helplessness of her husband. He was bitter and offered the argument he always used: “Things did not go as badly for me as they would for you if you tried to cure the sick.” But it was a useful lesson, and not for him alone. Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a Grand Designer, and revealing how the universe created itself. … Time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the big bang, because there was no time before the big bang. We have finally found something that does not have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything. … So when people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth. The Earth is a sphere. It does not have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.”
― Stephen W. Hawking

“ثمة شيء ننساه في زحمة التسابق على حفظ الجُمل الثورية الجميلة. هذا الشيء هو الكرامة الإنسانية. ليس وطني دائماً على حق. ولكنني لا أستطيع أن أمارس حقاً حقيقياً إلا في وطني.”
― محمود درويش, يوميات الحزن العادي

“المدن رائحة: عكا رائحة اليود البحري والبهارات. حيفا رائحة الصنوبر والشراشف المجعلكة. موسكو رائحة الفودكا على الثلج. القاهرة رائحة المانجو والزنجبيل. بيروت رائحة الشمس والبحر والدخان والليمون. باريس رائحة الخبز الطازج والأجبان ومشتقات الفتنة. دمشق رائحة الياسمين والفواكة المجففة. تونس رائحة مسك الليل والملح. الرباط رائحة الحناء والبخور والعسل. وكل مدينة لا تُعرفُ من رائحتها لا يُعوَّل على ذكراها. وللمنافي رائحة مشتركة هي رائحة الحنين إلى ما عداها... رائحة تتذكر رائحة أخرى. رائحة متقطعة الأنفاس، عاطفيّة تقودك كخارطة سياحية كثيرة الاستعمال إلى رائحة المكان الأول. الرائحة ذاكرةٌ وغروب شمس. والغروب هنا توبيخ الجمال للغريب.”
― محمود درويش, في حضرة الغياب

“وما معنى أن يكون الفلسطيني شاعراً، وما معنى أن يكون الشاعر فلسطينيا؟ الأول: أن يكون نتاجاً لتاريخ، موجوداً باللغة؟ والثاني: أن يكون ضحية لتاريخ، منتصرا باللغة. لكن الأول والثاني واحد لا ينقسم ولا يلتئم في آن واحد.”
― محمود درويش, في حضرة الغياب

“ سأحلم ، لا لأصلح أي معنى خارجي . بل كي أرمم داخلي المهجور .”
― محمود درويش, جدارية

“هِيَ: هل عرفتَ الحب يوماً؟
هُوَ: عندما يأتي الشتاء يمسُّني
شغفٌ بشيء غائب، أضفي عليه
الاسمَ، أي اسمٍ، أَنسى…
هي: ماالذي تنساه؟ قُل!
هو: رعشة الحُمَّى، وما أهذي به
تحت الشراشف حين أشهق: دَثِّريني
دثِّريني!
هي: ليس حُباً ما تقول
هو: ليس حباً ما أَقول
هي: هل شعرتَ برغبة في أن تعيش
الموت في حضن إمرأة؟
هو: كلما اكتمل الغيابُ حضرتُ…
وانكسر البعيد، فعانق الموتُ الحياةَ
وعانَقَتهُ… كعاشقين
هي: ثم ماذا؟
هو: ثم ماذا؟
هي: واتحَّدت بها، فلم تعرف يديها
من يديك وأنتما تتبخران كغيمةٍ زرقاءَ
لا تَتَبيَّنان أأنتما جسدان… أم طيفان
أم؟
هو: من هي الأنثى - مجازُ الأرض
فينا؟ مّن هو الذَّكرُ - السماء؟
هي: هكذا ابتدأ أغاني الحبّ. أنت إذن
عرفتَ الحب يوماً!
هو: كلما اكتمل الحضورُ ودُجِّن المجهول…
غبتُ
هي: إنه فصل الشتاء، ورُبَّما
أصبحتُ ماضيكَ المفضل في الشتاء
هو: ربما… فإلى اللقاء
هي: ربما.. فإلى اللقاء!”
― محمود درويش, كزهر اللوز أو أبعد

“هذا البحر لي
هذا الهواء الرطب لي
واسمي وان أخطأت لفظ اسمي على التابوت - لي ..
أما أنا - وقد امتلات بكل أسباب الرحييل
فلست لي .
أنا لست لي”
― محمود درويش, جدارية

“قل للغياب: نقصتني.. وأنا حضرت لأُكمّلك”
― محمود درويش, كزهر اللوز أو أبعد

“قل للحياة , كما يليق بشاعر متمرس
سيري ببطء كالإناث الواثقات بسحرهن و كيدهن
لكل واحدة نداء ما خفي
هيت لك...ما أجملك
سيري ببطء يا حياة لكي أراك بكامل النقصان حولي
كم نسيتك في خضمك باحثا عني و عنك
و كلما أدركت سرا منك قلت بقسوة...ما أجهلك
قل للغياب..نقصتني
وأنا حضرت.. لأكملك”
― محمود درويش, كزهر اللوز أو أبعد