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At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: December 1
Novelist
Poet
Psychotherapist
Writer
Fes
Morocco
Shoot
Discovered
Injustice
Army
Students
Real
Would
Repression
Bullets

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I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
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Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.
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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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Our steps invent the path as we proceed behind us they leave no trace, only the void. So we shall always look ahead and trust our feet. They will take us as far as our minds will go... -- Tahar ben Jelloun
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In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.
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New ideas should confront old ideas. We must refer to the example of Europe. People have fought to make Europe what it is today. Freedom is not something that is served up on a plate.
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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
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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.
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Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.
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I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
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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.
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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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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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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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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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I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
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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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Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
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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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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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