Dania > Dania's Quotes

“We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation."

(Defy the Space That Separates, The Nation, October 7, 1996)”
― Adrienne Rich

“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“وعندما زارت غولدا مئير, وهي واحدة من الزعماء الصهيونيين الكبار, حيفا بعد أيام قليلة, وجدت من الصعب عليها في البداية أن تكبت إحساساً بالرعب عندما دخلت البيوت حيث كان الطعام المطبوخ ما زال على الطاولات, والألعاب والكتب التي تركها الأطفال (الفلسطينيون) على الأرض, وحيث بدا الأمر كأن الحياة تجمدت في لحظة واحدة. وكانت مئير جاءت فلسطين من الولايات المتحدة, التي هربت عائلتها إليها في إثر المذابح المنظمة في روسيا, وذكرتها المناظر التي شاهدتها ذلك اليوم بأسوأ القصص التي سمعتها من عائلتها عن الوحشية ضد اليهود قبل عقود. لكن ذلك لم يؤثر, كما يبدو, في عزمها أو عزم زملائها على المضي قدماً في التطهير العرقي لفلسطين.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication-driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“أن لكل حضارة نمطها وأسلوبها وخيارها، وخيار العالم الغربي ذي الأصول الرومانية الوثنية قد جنح ببصره إلى ما حواه مما يحيط به: نحو الأشياء.
بينما الحضارة الإسلامية عقيدة التوحيد المتصل بالرسل قبلها، سبح خيارهُا نحو التطلع الغيبي وما وراء الطبيعة: نحو الأفكار.”
― مالك بن نبي, مشكلة الأفكار في العالم الإسلامي

“We know this world intimately and that is its uncanniness. We cannot bear our knowledge.”
― David Mura, A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction - An Essay

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein

“Some prisoners spent more than ten years buried in solitary cells the size of coffins, hearing nothing but clanging bars or footsteps in the corridors. . .[they] survived because they could talk to each other by tapping on the wall. In that way they told of dreams and memories, fallings in and out of love; they discussed, embraced, fought; they shared beliefs and beauties, doubts and guilts, and those questions that have no answers.
When it is genuine, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When denied a mouth, it speaks with the hands or the eyes, or the pores, or anything at all. Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others. ”
― Eduardo Galeano

“Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.”
― Mario Vargas-Llosa

“نحن لا ننسى فعلاً ما نقرأه، بل إن ما يحدث هو أن الأفكار التي تمتصها عيوننا تتسرب بشكل تلقائي إلى عقولنا فتجعلنا أكثر وعياً، وأخلاقنا فتجعلنا أكثر إنسانية، ولغتنا فنصبح أكثر فصاحة”
― Mohamed Al Marzooqi, هكذا تكلم القارئ: النقد الافتراضي ومشاغل أخرى

“عمرها ما كانت مشكلتنا مع الله، مشكلتنا مع الذين يعتبرون نفسهم بعد الله.”
― محمد الماغوط (مسرحية شقائق النعمان)

“ماذا يفعل هؤلاء العرب من المحيط إلى الخليج ؟ ., لقد أعطونا الساعات واخذوا الزمن , أعطونا الأحذية واخذوا الطرقات , اعطونا البرلمانات واخذوا الحرية , أعطونا العطر والخواتم واخذوا الحب , اعطونا الاراجيح واخذوا الأعياد , أعطونا الحليب المجفف واخذوا الطفولة , أعطونا السماد الكيماوي واخذوا الربيع , أعطونا الحراس والإقفال واخذوا الأمان ,أعطونا الثوار واخذوا الثوره”
― محمد الماغوط

“يا إلهي, كل الأوطان تنام وتنام، وفي اللحظة الحاسمة تستيقظ،الا الوطن العربي فيستيقظ ويستيقظ، وفي اللحظة الحاسمة ينام !”
― محمد الماغوط, سأخون وطني

“كل طبخة سياسية في المنطقة أمريكا تعدها وروسيا توقد تحتها وأوروبا تبردها وإسرائل تأكلها والعرب يغسلون الصحون.”
― محمد الماغوط, سأخون وطني

“ما من جريمة كاملة في هذا العصر سوى أن يولد الإنسان عربياً .”
― محمد الماغوط, سأخون وطني

“أيها العرب، استحلفكم بما تبقى في هذه الأمة من طفولة وحب وصداقة وأشجار وطيور وسحب وأنهار وفراشات، استحلفكم بتحية أعلامها عند الصباح وإطراقة جبينها عند المساء، لقد جربتم الإرهاب سنين وقروناً طويلة وها أنتم ترون إلى اين أودى بشعوبكم. جربوا الحرية يوماً واحداً لتروا كم هي شعوبكم كبيرة وكم هي إسرائيل صغيرة.”
― محمد الماغوط, سأخون وطني

“أمة بكاملها تحل الكلمات المتقاطعة وتتابع المباريات الرياضية أو تمثيلية السهرة والبنادق الإسرائيلية مصوبة إلى جبينها وأرضها وكرامتها وبترولها”
― محمد الماغوط, سأخون وطني

“أيها النسَّاجون : أريدُ كفنًا واسعًا لأحلامي”
― محمد الماغوط

“In the good old days of ‘actually existing Socialism,’ every schoolchild was told again and again of how Lenin read voraciously, and of his advice to young people: ‘Learn, learn, and learn!’ ... Marx, Engels, and Lenin were each asked which they preferred, a wife or a mistress. Marx, whose attitude in intimate matters is well known to have been rather conservative, answered ‘A wife’; Engels, who knew how to enjoy life, answered, of course, ‘A mistress’; the surprise comes with Lenin, who answered ‘Both, wife and mistress!’ Is he dedicated to a hidden pursuit of excessive sexual pleasures? No, since he quickly explains: ‘This way, you can tell your mistress that you’re with your wife, and your wife that you are about to visit your mistress…’ ‘And what do you actually do?’ ‘I go to a solitary place and learn, learn, and learn!”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies

“In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies

“Always historicize!”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“I am too full of life
to be half-loved.”
― Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada

“I have come to believe that it is our life's work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life's work work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every ruler there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life