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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.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: December 1
Novelist
Poet
Psychotherapist
Writer
Fes
Morocco
Trying
Paid
Going
Courage
Situation
High
Voice
Difficult
Intellectuals
Often
Opposition
Keep
Price

More quotes by Tahar Ben Jelloun

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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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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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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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Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.
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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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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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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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
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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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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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This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.
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There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.
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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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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
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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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun