Sami Michael - Quotations

Quotations

• "I am leaving Iraq totally. For ever. Until my death I will not see the Tigris. I will stand in a foreign street, in a foreign city and scream, and no one will hear me. It happens in my dreams. I already miss everything and I am still here. And I do not know in what way it is different from death." –A Handful of Fog

• "An immigrant is a person who commits suicide in the hope of being resurrected." –Unbounded Ideas

• "The true motherland, the most precious of all, is the woman that you love." –Aida

• "Nature is a gifted and cunning set designer. She creates an illusion of permanency and persistent continuity. Otherwise birds would not brood their eggs despite the nibbling hunger, trees would not blossom in times of drought, and man would not become slave of a treacherous piece of land. The mechanism of continuity revives burnt forests, placates erupting volcanoes, and brings relief and oblivion to the broken hearts." –Water Kissing Water

• "The shit of today is fertilizer for the flowers of tomorrow." –A Trumpet in the Wadi

• "From this height all cities look the same; Palaces and mansions become blurred. All of them, all the cities appear as gray scars scattered over the face of the earth." –Aida

• "It is hard to strive to be a good Arab, especially when you do not know exactly what a good Arab is. Many Jews think that a good Arab is a dead Arab. How is it possible to strive every day to be dead?" –A Trumpet in the Wadi

• "Living matter is a miracle in a universe dominated by emptiness and silence. The average matter in the known universe is almost zero. The distance from one planet to another is like the distance between two lonely people, one living alone in Israel, and the other, his closest neighbor, in Japan. Moreover, they flee one another at enormous speeds by astronomical computations. How wasteful we are with the living cell and the drop of water." –The Flight of the Swans

• "There are words that hurt when they are said, and there are words that injure more when they are unsaid." –The Flight of the Swans