Quotes of the Week - July 15, 2008:
"You are my lord, you're my darling, you're my orgy, my charming
prince." -- Carla Bruni-Sarkozy's tribute to husband, Nicholas
Sarkozy, president of France.
"Barack, he's talking down to black people. I want to cut his nuts
off." -- Jesse Jackson, US Democrat and civil rights activist,
about his party's presidential candidate Barack Obama.
"Many things that happened in the jungle we have to leave in the
jungle." -- Former hostage Ingrid Betancourt, refuses to discuss
certain details about her six years of captivity in jungles of Colombia.
"Europe is a family of 27 nations, we can't leave anyone behind."
-- Nicolas Sarkozy, French President, urging European Parliament to
speed negotiations over Lisbon Treaty.
Authors: Tahar Ben Jelloun Quotes,
Famous Tahar Ben Jelloun Quotes, Quotations, Sayings
Women should be equal to men in the Arab world…should
we wish to step forward. Tahar Ben Jelloun Quoted in Morocco Times
It's a book without concessions. I wrote it feverishly, bewitched
by it, surprising myself with an inner strength. Tahar Ben Jelloun On his 2001 novel This Blinding Absence
of Light
The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors
and fanaticism of human beings. Tahar Ben Jelloun Islam Explained (2002)
I am a French writer of a peculiar kind, a Frenchman whose
native tongue is Arabic, a language that holds my emotions and
affections, I am a Moroccan with no identity problems, one who
feeds on the popular imagination of Morocco - a country I will
never leave. Tahar Ben Jelloun
Emigration is no longer a solution; it's a defeat. People
are risking death, drowning every day, but they're knocking
on doors that are not open. My hope is that countries like Morocco
will have investment to create work, so people don't have to
leave. Tahar Ben Jelloun Quoted in The Guardian, May 2006
Racism is first and foremost self-hatred. And when it's erected
into a system, it spreads out from the self and includes one's
fellows. Tahar Ben Jelloun
In the 70s I was in exile; every time I went back I wondered
if they'd take my passport away. But now, like those writers
I admire - Joyce, Beckett, Genet - I feel only a metaphysical
exile. Tahar Ben Jelloun Quoted in The Guardian, May 2006
For a long time I searched for the black stone that cleanses
the soul of death. When I say a long time, I think of a bottomless
pit, a tunnel dug with my fingers, my teeth, in the stubborn
hope of glimpsing, if only for a minute, one infinitely lingering
minute, a ray of light, a spark that would imprint itself deep
within my eye, that would stay protected in my entrails like
a secret. There it would be, lodging in my breast and nourishing
my endless nights, there, in the depths of the humid earth,
in that tomb smelling of man stripped of his humanity by shovel
blows that flay him alive, snatching away his sight, his voice,
and his reason. Tahar Ben Jelloun This Blinding Absence of Light, opening
lines
When I was extremely tired, pages of Balzac or from Victor
Hugo would sometimes bombard me all mixed up together.... Losing
that inner strength immediately affected my situation in the
hole: my cell shrank. The walls closed in on me; the ceiling
dropped. I had to react quickly and recover that ability to
be in touch with distant and imaginary worlds.... I reach out
with both arms. I touch the walls. Sitting, I lift them up.
I'm two inches from the ceiling. The walls must move back. I
push them with the palms of my hands. I stand up, still hunched
over, and try to raise the ceiling as though it were a lid.
I will repeat this operation all day long. When I collapse in
exhaustion, I will know that I have managed to gain an inch
or so. The abstract problem - of memory - can be solved by acting
on something concrete,, the area of my incarceration. If I succeed
in organizing my mental library, I am saved. The walls will
no longer oppress me. If I escape in my mind by recovering the
characters imagined by my novelists, I won't have a problem
with my space anymore. Tahar Ben Jelloun This Blinding Absence of Light
Gradually I built up my library again. There were not many
books, but there was one I had read at the time of the competitive
entrance exam for the Moroccan Civil Service Academy (I flunked
it by one point): Camus's The Stranger. Ah, what joy, what delight
to rediscover those pages where every word, every phrase, is
carefully thought out! For a solid month, I recited The Stranger
to my companions. I remembered poor Abdelkader dying because
no one told him stories anymore. With Camus, I felt at ease
and was only too happy to recall certain passages. This conferred
on them an immense importance that went far beyond the story
of the crime. A novel related in a dungeon, in the presence
of death, cannot have the same meaning, the same consequences,
as it would when read on a beach or in a meadow, in the shade
of cherry trees.
... Like a distant murmur, I heard someone repeating the opening
of the book.
"Mama died today. Or perhaps yesterday, I'm not sure. I
received a telegram from the nursing home: 'Mother deceased.
Funeral tomorrow. Deepest sympathy.' The meaning isn't clear.
Maybe it was yesterday."
Then I heard a different voice.
"Today, I am going to die. Or maybe tomorrow. I don't know.
My mother will not receive a telegram from Tazmamart, or any
deepest sympathy. The meaning isn't clear. Maybe it was yesterday."
Another voice.
"Then, I shot four more times at a motionless body, into
which the bullets vanished without a trace. As if I were giving
four brief knocks on misfortune's door." Tahar Ben Jelloun This Blinding Absence of Light
Sex
and the City
