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Morocco Quotes

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Morocco Quotes

“You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the French say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the Friends of Independence, say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. All lies are sins. And so, which displeases Allah more, a lie told by a Nazarene, who doesn’t know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by a Moslem, who does?”

TruthPoliticsLiesColonialismFrenchSinsMoroccoPolitiqueNazareneFrench MoroccoMoslemFrench Colonialism
Book:The Spider's House
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“Yes, but perhaps he did have something to do with it.” (In such arguments Stenham often found himself unexpectedly extolling the bourgeois virtues.) “If he was good himself, and worked hard—” “Never!” cried Amar, his eyes blazing. “You’re a Nazarene, a Christian. That’s why you talk that way. If you were a Moslem and said such things, you’d be killed or struck blind here, this minute. Christians have good hearts, but they don’t know anything. They think they can change what has been written. They’re afraid to die because they don’t understand what death is for. And if you’re afraid to die, then you don’t know what life is for. How can you live?”

LifeChristianDeathExistenceDestinyIslamSurrenderMeaning Of LifeColonialismWillMoroccoNazareneFrench MoroccoMoslem
Book:The Spider's House
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“There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate." (But it's hard to feign innocence if you've eaten the apple, he reflected.) "And it looks to me as if it is going to go on, because the French aren't going to give in, and certainly the Arabs aren't, because they can't. They're fighting with their backs the the wall." "I thought maybe you meant you expected a new world war," he lied. "That's the least of my worries. When that comes, we've had it. You can't sit around mooning about Judgement Day. That's just silly. Everybody who ever lived has always had his own private Judgment Day to face anyway, and he still has. As far as that goes, nothing's changed at all.”

RevolutionIndependenceInnocenceColonialismEdenFrenchUprisingUnrestMoroccoJudgment DayParadise Lost
Book:The Spider's House
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“That still did not invalidate their purity in his eyes, so long as they continued to live the way they lived: sitting on the floor, eating with their fingers, cooking and sleeping first in one room, then in another, or in the vast patio with its fountains, or on the roof, leading the existence of nomads inside the beautiful shell which was the house. If he had felt that they were capable of discarding their utter preoccupation with the present, in order to consider the time not yet arrived, he would straightway have lost interest in them and condemned them as corrupt.”

BeautifulFuturePresentCorruptMoroccoCondemnNomadsNazareneMoslemUncorruptedUnspoiledFrench Colonial
Book:The Spider's House
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“Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. They’ve lost everything and gained nothing. The French had merely daubed on the finishing touches at the end of a process which had begun five hundred years ago, at least. Their intuitive moral desires coincided with the ideals embodied in the formulas of their religion, yet they could live in accordance neither with those deepest impulses nor with the precepts of the religion, because society came in between with all the pressure of its tradition. No one could afford to be honest or generous or merciful because every one of them distrusted all the others; often they had more confidence in a Christian they were meeting for the first time than in a Moslem they had known for years.”

ChristianityTraditionIslamConformityColonialismMistrustWestern CivilizationDecadenceHegemonyMoroccoSocial ConventionWesternizationFrench MoroccoSocial Pressures
Book:The Spider's House
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“Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it’s pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like, let’s say, crossing the street at one point instead of another.” “Yes, yes, yes, I know,” Stenham said with exaggerated weariness. “As far as I’m concerned that’s just as boring, and a lot more false, by the way. The point I’m trying to make is that he loves his world of Koranic law because it’s his, and at the same time he hates it because his intuition tells him it’s at the end of its rope. He can’t expect anything more from it. And our world, he hates that too, just on general principles, and yet it’s his only hope, the only way out—if there is one for him personally, which I doubt.”

CultureColonialismImperialismModernityModernismWestern CivilizationRelativismMoroccoWay Of LifeKoranFrench MoroccoWestern Dominion
Book:The Spider's House
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“Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him it was this eternal contradiction which made them Moslems. But Amar’s relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Stenham’s calculations. For Stenham, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations.”

SocietyTraditionIslamColonialismVariationStereotypesIndividuationMoroccoArchetypesCustomFrench MoroccoIndividual Variation
Book:The Spider's House
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“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.”

ReligionAtheismSecurityIndiaSalvationIslamIraqDebateGermanyTemplesMiddle EastShakespearePolandNormalityAncestorsJewsEastern EuropeIstanbulEinsteinAntisemitismMoroccoSpinozaTunisiaPragueMarilyn MonroeBudapestJewishnessEritreaArthur MillerKurdish PeopleSynagoguesDesecrationDamascusJewish QuestionMartin AmisRabbisReligious ConversionDavid RieffAnnie NavaskyBar And Bat MitzvahBest ManRobert GoldburgSteve WassermanVictor Saul Navasky
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“(July 29, 1949 letter to Truman Capote, in Tangiers, Morocco) You have probably never received those delicious epistles which I never wrote—let alone sent. But there you are selling grain in the marketplace with little Jane [Bowles]—and now both of you adored by Berbers and strange wide-eyed men such as have never adored me. When are you coming home to your sweet old bald-head mom?”

GayMoroccoTruman CapoteJane Bowles
Book:The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman
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“POEM FOR SOUKAÏNA” **** To tell of my new Moroccan Love, Ô, I court her everyday. But just as a pearl in the mud is a pearl, So is my Love just an Arab girl… in that I offer her constant, loving woos, but she’ll ask me in return that I give her flooze*. That’s when I kiss her and shrug, and I say, “Someday.” And she gives me her love free anyway. * * * Ô, my Love is a child of the souks. In Casablanca born. A gypsy thief, “Soukaïna” named. We met in the souks of Marrakech, It was here my heart she tamed. Ô, she came at nineteen to Marrakech, In search of wild fun. And she lived in Marrakech seven years, Before my heart she won.”

Love StoryArabic PoetryMoroccoArabicSaharaMoroccanMarrakechMarrakeshNorth African PoetrySaharan
Author:Roman Payne
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“You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?” Amar did not completely understand. “But I hate them now,” he explained. “The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He’ll change my heart.” The man was smiling, as if to himself. “If the world’s really like that, it’s very easy to be in it,” he said. “It will never be easy to be in the world,” Amar said firmly. “Er tabi mabrhach. God doesn’t want it easy.”

GodHateEasyColonialismMoroccoFrench Morocco
Book:The Spider's House
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“I had this extraordinarily bizarre moment when, two Fridays ago, my missus gave birth to our second child at 11am and by the same time the following day I was sitting around a table with Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio in Rabat in Morocco, rehearsing a scene we were going to shoot the next day.”

ChildrenTwoMomentsNextBirthSceneSittingTablesFollowingNext DayBizarreFridaySitting AroundLeonardoRehearsingMoroccoSitting Around A Table
Author:Mark Strong
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“Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”

LittlesLongBookHomeEyeLeftWhiteCasesPiecesMarkFingersSatisfactionCornersTinyNervousShirtsHis EyesBottlesDelicateSighThrustNeedlesNeatWristsHolmesLittle TimeVelvetMoroccoArmchairsCuffsPuncture
Book:The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Illustrated): All 4 Novels and 56 Stories with More Than 480 Illustrations
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“Today, any action anywhere on earth has an immediate repercussion on all five continents. News of a victory of the Eastern armies in Morocco or Shanghai travels instantly, thanks to modern means of communication, to all Eastern peoples and fills them with enthusiasm and faith. This phenomenon is, of course, unprecedented in the history of man.”

MenMeanTodayActionEarthCoursesFiveModernCommunicationInternetVictoryNewsArmyEnthusiasmThanksPhenomenonContinentsFree SpeechEasternUnprecedentedRepercussionsMoroccoShanghaiMeans Of Communication
Author:Nikos Kazantzakis
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“It's amazing, it's pumping, it's furious, it's anxious, it's happy and it's far more real than anything you'll ever experience in a Western city. Morocco is a living, pulsating entity which is rapidly changing all the time but there are parts of Marrakesh that carry on as they have done for a thousands years. The music is a reflection of that, of all times and all religions and of all the natural expectations and conditions of the people who live there.”

PeopleYearsRealDoneNaturalCitiesConditionsMusic IsReflectionExpectationsWesternAll TimeAnxiousEntityFuriousMorocco
Author:Robert Plant
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“If you look at the list of the top wheat importers for 2010, almost half of them are Middle Eastern regimes: Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Tunisia. Egypt is the number-one importer of wheat in the entire world. Tunisia leads the entire world in per capita wheat consumption. So it's no wonder that the revolutions began with Tunisians waving baguettes in the streets and Egyptians wearing helmets made of bread.”

IfsWorldLooksMadeNumbersHalfWonderStreetsMiddleRevolutionIraqListsBreadRegimesConsumptionEgyptEasternWheatArabiaSaudi ArabiaSaudisHelmetLibyaMoroccoYemenTunisiaAlgeriaBaguettes
Author:Annia Ciezadlo
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“We are not shrinking from talking to Saudis or anyone else in the region, but it is up to each nation in the region to decide on its own how it will proceed and at what pace. There are other nations in the region that had similar policies to Saudi Arabia that are starting to make changes, such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Morocco. And so it takes time but when you see the need for such changes, then changes tend to follow.”

NeedsNationsTalkingPolicyStartingRegionsPaceTake TimeMaking ChangesArabiaSaudi ArabiaSaudisShrinkingIt Takes TimeMoroccoKuwaitQatarBahrain
Author:Colin Powell
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