Morocco Quotes

“Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.”
― Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh

“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“I wish she’d said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can’t hide from it, not even here.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.”
― Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself

“Come to think of it, maybe God is a He after all, because only a cruel force would create something this beautiful and make it inaccessible to most people.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“In this city [Tingis] the Libyans say that Antaeus is buried; and Sertorius had his tomb dug open, the great size of which made him disbelieve the Barbarians. But when he came upon the body and found it to be sixty cubits long, as they tell us, he was dumbfounded, and after performing a sacrifice filled up the tomb again, and joined in magnifying its traditions and honours. Now, the people of Tingis have a myth that after the death of Antaeus, his wife, Tinga, consorted with Heracles, and that Sophax was the fruit of this union, who became king of the country and named a city which he founded after his mother; also that Sophax had a son, Diodorus, to whom many of the Libyan peoples became subject, since he had a Greek army composed of the Olbians and Mycenaeans who were settled in those parts by Heracles. But this tale must be ascribed to a desire to gratify Juba, of all kings the most devoted to historical enquiry; for his ancestors are said to have been descendants of Sophax and Diodorus. [The Life of Sertorius]”
― Plutarch, Parallel Lives

“Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved with existence.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell.”
― Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself

“If Aphrodite chills at home in Cyprus for most of the year, then Fez must be the goddess’s playground.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“POEM FOR SOUKAÏNA”
****
To tell of my new Moroccan Love,
Ô, I court her everyday.
But just as a pearl in the mud is a pearl,
So is my Love just an Arab girl…
in that I offer her constant, loving woos,
but she’ll ask me in return that I give her flooze*.
That’s when I kiss her and shrug, and I say, “Someday.”
And she gives me her love free anyway.
* * *
Ô, my Love is a child of the souks.
In Casablanca born.
A gypsy thief, “Soukaïna” named.
We met in the souks of Marrakech,
It was here my heart she tamed.
Ô, she came at nineteen to Marrakech,
In search of wild fun.
And she lived in Marrakech seven years,
Before my heart she won.”
― Roman Payne

“I began this lifelong lesson. If human beings eat a thing, and if I am not so violently repelled by my own upbringing that I cannot speak, and if it is visually clean within reason, and if I am not allergic to the offering, I will sit at the table and with all the gusto I can manufacture I will join in the feast.

P.S. I call this a lifelong lesson for I have not fully learned it and I am often put to the test...”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it’s pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like, let’s say, crossing the street at one point instead of another.”
“Yes, yes, yes, I know,” Stenham said with exaggerated weariness. “As far as I’m concerned that’s just as boring, and a lot more false, by the way. The point I’m trying to make is that he loves his world of Koranic law because it’s his, and at the same time he hates it because his intuition tells him it’s at the end of its rope. He can’t expect anything more from it. And our world, he hates that too, just on general principles, and yet it’s his only hope, the only way out—if there is one for him personally, which I doubt.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. They’ve lost everything and gained nothing. The French had merely daubed on the finishing touches at the end of a process which had begun five hundred years ago, at least. Their intuitive moral desires coincided with the ideals embodied in the formulas of their religion, yet they could live in accordance neither with those deepest impulses nor with the precepts of the religion, because society came in between with all the pressure of its tradition. No one could afford to be honest or generous or merciful because every one of them distrusted all the others; often they had more confidence in a Christian they were meeting for the first time than in a Moslem they had known for years.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“That still did not invalidate their purity in his eyes, so long as they continued to live the way they lived: sitting on the floor, eating with their fingers, cooking and sleeping first in one room, then in another, or in the vast patio with its fountains, or on the roof, leading the existence of nomads inside the beautiful shell which was the house. If he had felt that they were capable of discarding their utter preoccupation with the present, in order to consider the time not yet arrived, he would straightway have lost interest in them and condemned them as corrupt.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?”

Amar did not completely understand. “But I hate them now,” he explained. “The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He’ll change my heart.”

The man was smiling, as if to himself. “If the world’s really like that, it’s very easy to be in it,” he said.

“It will never be easy to be in the world,” Amar said firmly. “Er tabi mabrhach. God doesn’t want it easy.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“Yes, but perhaps he did have something to do with it.” (In such arguments Stenham often found himself unexpectedly extolling the bourgeois virtues.) “If he was good himself, and worked hard—”

“Never!” cried Amar, his eyes blazing. “You’re a Nazarene, a Christian. That’s why you talk that way. If you were a Moslem and said such things, you’d be killed or struck blind here, this minute. Christians have good hearts, but they don’t know anything. They think they can change what has been written. They’re afraid to die because they don’t understand what death is for. And if you’re afraid to die, then you don’t know what life is for. How can you live?”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him it was this eternal contradiction which made them Moslems. But Amar’s relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Stenham’s calculations. For Stenham, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the French say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the Friends of Independence, say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. All lies are sins. And so, which displeases Allah more, a lie told by a Nazarene, who doesn’t know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by a Moslem, who does?”
― paul bowles, The Spider's House

“His name was Mohamed. And, like so many others, he dreamt about leaving Morocco some day, for France, Spain, Germany, it didn’t matter where, but his wildest dream was about going to the United States. He knew what he had to do, had even come up with a plan, a simple one, simple but effective: seduce a Western woman, offer himself to her, show her what a Moroccan man was capable of, in other words, fuck her like an animal, make her see stars in broad daylight, screw her nonstop, drive her wild, make her worthy of him, deserving of his cock.”
― Abdellah Taïa, Salvation Army

“It is very curious to see how in China and Morocco the vanquished pay for the costs of the expedition that crushed them.”
― Leopold II

“What I liked so much was their freedom from the constraint on time,” he says. “When I went back to Morocco it occurred to me that [in the United States] we don’t have this wonderful calm. They are daydreaming, what we would call in the west, ‘wasting time.’

(From 2004 in berkeleydailyplanet)”
― Khalil Bendib

“There is a Cinzano on the table beside me and a siphon of aerated water. I am at a loss to know how ants have got into the siphon. Neither the ants themselves nor the people who filled the siphons can have intended this.”
― Peter Mayne

“She discovered a whole square devoted to seafood- squid and sea bass, shrimp, prawns, rock lobsters, octopus, sea cucumbers, and a pallet of unidentifiable slugs and snails, creatures with fluorescent fins and prehistoric shells, things Marguerite was sure Dusty Tyler had never seen in all his life. In Morocco, the women did the shopping, all of them in ivory or black burkhas. Most of them kept their faces covered as well; Candace called these women the "only eyes." They peered at Marguerite (who wore an Hermés scarf over her hair, a gift from one of her customers) and she shivered. Marguerite's favorite place of all was the spice market- dozens of tables covered with pyramids of saffron and turmeric, curry powder and cumin, fenugreek, mustard seed, cardamom, paprika, mace, nutmeg.”
― Elin Hilderbrand, The Love Season

“The caliphate of al-Nasir saw the first sustained involvement by the Umayyads in North African politics.26 Morocco at this stage was, compared with Muslim Spain, a very underdeveloped country. There had been very little Arab settlement and the country remained over-whelmingly Berber and largely rural, the inhabitants living either as pastoral nomads or settled farmers. Tribal allegiances and rival-ries remained the basis of political activity. Only Fes, settled in the ninth century by colonists from Qayrawan and Cordoba, was a really urban community, although Sijilmassa, the great entrepot for Saharan trade far to the south, was a large oasis settlement. In theory much of the area was under the authority of the Idrisids, based in Fes. The Idrisids were descendants of 'Ali, who had fled west in 786 after a failed rebellion against the Abbasids.27 They did not rule a state in the conventional sense but, somewhat like the traditional Zaydi Imams of Yemen, enjoyed a certain prestige among the tribal leaders because of their religious status and were acknowledged as mediators if not rulers. They seem to have had no organized administration or government apparatus. By the beginning of the tenth century, the Idrisid family had split into many different branches which vied ineffectually for such authority as the family name could still command. Smaller but more coherent were the political units based on Sijilmassa and Nakur. Sijilmassa on the fringes of the Sahara was ruled by the Midrarids, a Berber dynasty of Kharijite persuasions. Nakur on the Mediterranean coast was a small city-state ruled by a popular Sunni dynasty, the Banu Witt, who had had contacts with the Umayyads in the previous century. There had certainly been commercial and personal contacts between al-Andalus and North Africa in the ninth century, especially with the Rustamid dynasty of Tahert in central Algeria.”
― Hugh Kennedy

“(July 29, 1949 letter to Truman Capote, in Tangiers, Morocco)

You have probably never received those delicious epistles which I never wrote—let alone sent. But there you are selling grain in the marketplace with little Jane [Bowles]—and now both of you adored by Berbers and strange wide-eyed men such as have never adored me. When are you coming home to your sweet old bald-head mom?”
― Leo Lerman, The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman

“The Moroccan football team has taught us a lot but the greatest lesson is; our mothers are everything”
― Aysha Taryam

“Authentic Moroccan heritage has a strong immunity to foreign cultures, so that it accepts openness without being affected by any external culture. We must sustain and consolidate this immunity in order to preserve our identity as Moroccans.”
― Mohammed Tijani Nassiri

“I had to demonstrate that I had mastered the routes only a resident of the medina, the ancient city, would know. If I could not master the alleys, I would be forever hounded by the hawkers and illicit guides who preyed upon the unsuspecting, the weak, the lost, the tourists.”
― Azzedine T. Downes, The Couscous Chronicles: Stories of Food, Love, and Donkeys from a Life between Cultures

“Traveling-- it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
― Ibn Battuta