Mustafa Mustafa > Mustafa's Quotes

“هزي جذع هذه اللحظة
تُساقط عليك موتاً سخيا


مريم عراقية”
― Sinan Antoon, يا مريم

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“البيض يظلّون يتحدّثون عن (السلام) وعن ضرورة أن يصل المرء إلى حالة سلام مع ماضيه. أنا لا أؤمن بهذا المنطق. هناك أشياء لا يمكن القبول بها وهناك ذكريات يجب أن تظل حيّة.”
― Sinan Antoon, فهرس

“عدت إلى البيت لأجد جدّتي جالسة وصينية الشاي أمامها كالعادة، لكنَّها كانت تبكي بحرقة. سألتها مستفسراً:

ـ شْبيكي؟

ـ تعال وشوف. طلع هسّه ناطق من وزارة الداخلية وقال "على المواطنين التبرُّع بأعينهم دعماً للمجهود الحربيّ"، وقال همّينه إِنّو المدارس رَحْيسَوَّوها مراكز يجمعون بِيها عيون الناس والكِلّ لازم يروحون يوقَفون سِرَه... هسّه ذهب إِفتهمنا وانطينا... فلوس، هم قِلْنَا مَيْخالِف، بَسْ عيون الناس؟ هاي شيسَمَوَّها يعني؟ بالعمر وبالزمان! اللَّه ياخِذِهم كلتّم! هذا شلون زمان أسود!”
― Sinan Antoon, I'jaam

“Do the roots reveal everything to the branches, or do they keep what is painful to themselves?”
― Sinan Antoon

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“All thinking men are atheists.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“إن الرأي الجديد هو في العادة رأي غريب لم تألفه النفوس بعد. وما دام هذا الرأي غير خاضع للقيم التقليدية السائدة في المجتمع. فهو كفر أو زندقة. وعندما يعتاد عليه الناس ويصبح مألوفاً وتقليداً يدخل في سجل الدين ويمسي المخالفون له زنادقة وكفاراً.”
― علي الوردي, وعاظ السلاطين

“المدرَسة لا تُعلِّم شيئاً ، لا تعلِّم سوى الكسَل .. فاتركها وغِص في المقلاة مثلمَا فعلَ سائر ُالبشَر .”
― Ghassan Kanafani

“لقد اكتشفت انا -كما يجب أن تكون اكتشفت أنت منذ زمن بعيد - كم هو ضروري ان يموت بعض الناس …من أجل أن يعيش البعض الآخر..انها حكمة قديمة ..أهم ما فيها الآن …أنني أعيشها

I have discovered what you have probably discovered a long time ago: how inevitable it is for some people to die for some others to live.. The most significant thing about this ancient wisdom is that I’m living it now..”
― Ghassan Kanafani

“My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.”
― Ghassan Kanafani

“She said that her grandmother was skeptical of many things in this world and of none more than men. She said that in every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die. Her grandmother spoke to her often of men and she spoke with great earnestness and she said that rash men were a great temptation to women and this was simply a misfortune like others and there was little that could be done to remedy it. She said that to be a woman was to live a life of difficulty and heartbreak and those who said otherwise simply had no wish to face the facts. And she said that since this was so nor could it be altered one was better to follow one’s heart in joy and in misery than simply to seek comfort for there was none. To seek it was only to welcome in the misery and to know little else. She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“the planned destruction of Iraq’s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq’s sovereignty. The most crippling for the people and the economy of Iraq was Order 81 which deals, among other things, with plant varieties and patents. The goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping — to wipe out Iraq’s traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture. There was no public or parliamentary debate for the conquered people who never sought war. The conquerors made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law: henceforth, plant forms could be patented — which was never allowed before — while genetically-modified organisms were to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds: this, in a country where, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers planted only their own saved seeds. With a single stroke of the pen, Iraq’s agriculture was axed, while Order 81 facilitated the introduction and domination of imported, high-priced corporate seeds, mainly from the US — which neither reproduce, nor give yields without their prescribed chemical fertiliser and pesticide inputs. It meant that the majority of farmers who had never spent money on seed and inputs that came free from nature, would henceforth have to heavily invest in corporate inputs and equipment — or go into debt to obtain them, or accept lowered profits, or give up farming altogether.”
― Anonymous