Izzeldin Abuelaish · 237 pages
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“Tragedy cannot be the end of our lives. We cannot allow it to control and defeat us.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“...you shouldn’t hate something you don’t know, because it may turn out to be the bearer of your greatest good fortune.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“For any human being, freedom is essential, crucial, to our dignity and our ability to be fully human.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“It is true that the sky was always beautiful but I don't remember marvelling at sunset or gazing at the dawn of a new day. Survival does not allow time for poetic reflection.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“How come a Palestinian child does not live like an Israeli child? Why do Palestinian children have to toil at any manner of hard jobs just to be able to go to school? How is it that when we are sick. we can't get the medical help the Israeli kids take for granted?”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“It is human nature to seek revenge in the face of relentless suffering. You can’t expect an unhealthy person to think logically.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“Traveling has become such a miserable experience that no Palestinian does it, except those who absolutely have to: students attending foreign universities, patients needing care unavailable in Gaza, businesspeople attempting to pretend that their world will eventually be normal.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“The Palestinian mother is the author of the survival story of the Palestinian people. She is the heroine, the one behind the success.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“No one has the luxury of deciding "when" to travel; you wait prepared to travel whenever the border is open, which could be today, tomorrow or next week or three, four months from now.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“We must speak and move forward as one to achieve our brighter future; we are all living in one boat, and any harm to some people in this boat puts us all in danger of drowning.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“Anger and violence in Gaza and among Gazans is completely predictable. In a situation like ours, the absence of violence and anger would be abnormal. All of of us feel angry at least occasionally.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“People should know that Palestinians don't live for themselves alone. They live for each other. What I do for myself and my children, I also do for all my family. We are a community.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“Gaza 1948: "Gaza was not a refugee camp yet, just a place designated for Palestinian people when the state of Israel came begin. But day by day it filled up with people who had no place else to go to.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“Your home, whatever it is, is where feel safe, or at least grounded. To be pushed out of t is to be marked with the scar of expulsion for the rest of your life.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“By the age of seven, as an eldest boy, I was expected to help the family with the money." !!!!!!!!!!”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“was our suffering of any consequence to their consciences? Did they see us as victims> Or were we simply nameless, faceless humans who were in their way?”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“I am a physician, and as a consequence I see things most clearly in medical terms. I am arguing that we need an immunization program, one that injects people with respect, dignity, and equality. One that inoculates them against hatred.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“thundering, fulminating sound that penetrated my body as though it were coming from within me. I remember the sound. I remember the blinding flash. Suddenly it was pitch-dark, there was dust everywhere, something was sucking the air out of me, I was suffocating. Abdullah was still on my shoulders, Raffah came running screaming from the kitchen, Mohammed stood frozen at the front door. As the dust began to settle, I realized the explosion had come from my daughters’ bedroom. I put Abdullah down, and Bessan ran ahead of me from the kitchen—we wound up at the bedroom door at the same time. The sight in front of me was something I hope no other person ever has to witness. Bedroom furniture, school books, dolls, running shoes and pieces of wood were splintered in a heap, along with the body parts of my daughters and my niece. Shatha was the only one standing. Her eye was on her cheek, her body covered in bloody puncture wounds, her finger hanging by a thread of skin. I found Mayar’s body on the ground; she’d been decapitated. There was brain material on the ceiling, little girls’ hands and feet on the floor as if dropped there by someone who left too quickly. Blood spattered the entire room, and arms in familiar sweaters and legs in pants that belonged to my children leaned at crazed angles where they had blown off the torsos of my beloved daughters and niece. I ran to the front door for help but realized I couldn’t go”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“That's the thing about war: it's never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they're hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.”
― Izzeldin Abuelaish, quote from I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
“A broken heart is just the growing pains necessary so that you can love more completely when the real thing comes along.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“The men were ordered to retreat, and to leave the dead. In the sun the injured would die of thirst the following day. “That was the moment when I realised the truth of my mother’s words, that we were just ‘cannon-fodder’. Young private soldiers were ordered, time and time again, to march directly into gunfire, and High Command didn’t give a damn how many died, nor the cost in human suffering.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Shadows of the Workhouse
“Darkness will never prevail. If you do not recognize the evil in our world, you will never stand up to it.”
― quote from First Night of Summer
“I don't know what's happening to me," she says, blinking through a veil of tears as she looks everywhere but at me. "I don't think I can do this anymore."
My heart plummets inside my chest, my lips still hovering over hers, my hands on her waist "do what anymore?" I don't want the answer, don't want to hear what follows my question, don't want to lose her.
"Fight it." Tears are still flowing from her eyes, but I think she stop crying. She sucks and several breaths when she looks at me, her eyes are clear that I anticipated. She's scared shitless - that's clear - but it's like she stop fighting the fear, giving into it instead.
Her lips apart and I'm a stop whatever she's about to say, silence her with my lips, but I don't, forcing myself to hear, needing to know what's got all worked up.
"I think I'm in love with you," she says, her chest heaving with every ravenous breath she takes, yet her voice is astonishingly even and she manages to maintain my gaze.
My voice however is the exact opposite of even, coming out all high-pitched like I'm a thirteen year old and going through puberty all over again. "What?"
She sucks and a breath, then releases is slowly, the fear in her eyes subsiding, as if she just won it. "I think I'm in love with you..." She bites on your lips and shakes her head. "No...I don't think. I know."
I gradually process her words and the full extent of what she's saying. I think I'd honestly believed that she might never say them, that this love thing was going to be a one-way street. Hearing her say it... I don't even know how to describe it. It's like my entire life of associated the word with hatred. Every time my mother said it, it felt like she was trying to take something from me and it made me hate her and myself-Love equaled hate for me. But hearing it from Violet's lips, seeing that look in her eyes, the one I've never seen from anyone, is so different. She's not taking something for me right now, she's giving me something.
She's giving me everything.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Certainty of Violet & Luke
“Byron had drawn his pistol, and was looking closely at the leaves and dirt around him, as if he'd dropped something. "It's -- do keep calm now -- it's right over your head. I suppose you could look, if you can do it slowly."
Crawford felt drops of sweat run down his ribs under his shirt as he slowly forced the muscles of his neck to tilt his head up; he saw the upper slope, bristling with trees that obstructed a view of the road, and then he saw the outer branches of the tree he was braced against, and finally he gathered his tattered courage and looked straight up.
And it took all of his self-control not to recoil or scream, and he was distantly resentful that he couldn't just die in this instant.”
― Tim Powers, quote from The Stress of Her Regard
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