ditten's reviews
605 reviews

 "We want more light, more breathing-space, more tolerance and understanding: not this narrow-minded wholesale condemnation and covering-up; this instinctive shuddering and turning away from a side of nature that, like every other side, has its right to a hearing, its right to open discussion."

"The senselessness of all his repression and self-denial stood revealed to him. Seeing at last with Alan's eyes, and in the light of his own experience, he recognised that herein had lain the real perversion: in the continuous struggle between brain and body, the continuous struggle to suppress his instincts and force them into ways not natural to them. It had not lain in his passion for Alan. That, and that alone, given the peculiarities of his nature, had been right, had been beautiful, because it was truthful."

"You’re perfect for me. You really are.”
“Don’t be disgusting.”

"Harper, you’ve no idea. I’m going to keep you forever. Don’t you know?"

"Sir, we are not welcome anywhere.
Only cemeteries don’t mind our bodies.

We no longer look for Palestine.
Our time is spent dying.
Soon, Palestine will search for us,
for our whispers, for our footsteps,
our fading pictures fallen off blown-up walls."

"This is not a poem.
This is a grave, not
beneath the soil of Homeland,
but above a flat, light white
rag of paper."

"Now it’s 2024, and the cemetery you were buried in was razed by Israeli bulldozers and tanks. How can I find you now?

Will my bones find yours after I die?"

"The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing."

"The flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it."

"The present onslaught leaves no space for mourning, since mourning requires an afterward, but only for repeated shock and the ebb and flow of grief. We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope? To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak"

"It will be easy to say, in hindsight, what a terrible thing. That was a terrible moment, when the movements of the world were out of my hands. 
Do not give in. Be like the Palestinians in Gaza. Look them in the face. Say: that’s me! Mahmoud Darwish tells us: “Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation; rather she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth.”"

"It’s one thing to see shifts on an individual level, but quite another to see them on an institutional or governmental one. To induce a person’s change of heart is different from challenging the tremendous force of collective denial."

"Somewhere recently humanity seems to have crossed an invisible line, and on this side naked power combined with the will to profit threaten to overwhelm the collective interests of our species."