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During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.

Amin Maalouf

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Amin Maalouf
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: February 25
Author
Journalist
Librettist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ideas
Australia
Lebanon
Might
Began
Unthinkable
Like
Youth
Cuba
Idea
Uncles
Moving
Realise
Left
Egypt
Others
Realising
America
Grandfather

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Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices
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Doctrines are meant to serve man, not the other way around.
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You can't say history teaches us this or that it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.
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Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness was promised to us at birth. Promised? By whom?
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We are not just visitors on this planet, it belongs to us just as we belong to her, its past is ours, so is its future.
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All pleasures must be paid for, do not despise those that state their price.
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A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.
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Isn't it a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?
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life is not so long that one can grow tired of it
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The identity cannot be compartmentalized it cannot be split in halves or thirds, nor have any clearly defined set of boundaries. I do not have several identities, I only have one, made of all the elements that have shaped its unique proportions.
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God, she was beautiful - my first image of the Orient - a woman such as only the desert poet knew how to praise: her face was the sun, her hair the protecting shadow, her eyes fountains of cool water, her body the most slender of palm-trees and her smile a mirage.
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How do I pray? I study a rose, I count the stars, I marvel at the beauty of creation and how perfectly ordered it is, at man, the most beautiful work of the Creator, his brain thirsting for knowledge, his heart for love, and his senses, all his senses alert or gratified.
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are you certain that a man's life begins with his birth?
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Let your tears roll tonight, but tomorrow you will start the battle again. What defeats us, always, is just our own sorrow.
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Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.
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People sometimes imagine that just because they have access to so many newspapers, radio and TV channels, they will get an infinity of different opinions. Then they discover that things are just the opposite: the power of these loudspeakers only amplifies the opinion prevalent at a certain time, to the point where it covers any other opinion.
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Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them.
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... we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.
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Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.
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What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself
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