Quote

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.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: December 1
Novelist
Poet
Psychotherapist
Writer
Fes
Morocco
Doors
Emigration
Longer
Idaho
Open
Risking
Death
Knocking
Every
Drowning
People
Solution
Defeat
Solutions

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I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
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At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.
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We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.
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This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.
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It is impossible to disregard such an important medium as television. We should know how to use it, learn to work in it and express new values in it.
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I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take.
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Most of those who died did not die of hunger but of hatred. Feeling hatred diminishes you. It eats at your from within and attacks the immune system. When you have hatred inside you, it always crushes you in the end.
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In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.
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Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
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Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.
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I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.
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I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
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In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.
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We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.
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Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.
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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
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I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.
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What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.
Tahar Ben Jelloun