Memoirists

"Of course, Israel has the right to self-defense – that is very clear"

"When they are saying that it is weaponised by Hamas, and only given to people that are close to Hamas, then the response would be [to] flood Gaza with humanitarian aid so that there would be no deficit and it can't be used. Like you say, it can, so we are also offering our help. We have the EUBAM Rafah border crossing mission. We are also ready to increase this, to help with the distribution of humanitarian aid, but we are not allowed to. So for me, it is an immense frustration that we can't really do anything. Of course, we will have a discussion about this agreement. I know what the end result is going to be, because I know the positions of the Member States. Even if we suspended this agreement, it wouldn't stop the killing, and that is the problem. That's really where the frustration comes, because we all see that this is untenable, the loss of life, the human suffering, and we really need to help them. We are, together with Arab countries, discussing what more we can do, but again we need our American friends on board and to understand that the situation is completely untenable."

"I hear what the Israeli government is saying: that humanitarian aid has also been weaponized, But if Gaza were truly flooded with humanitarian aid, there would be no shortage, which means no one could weaponize it."

"It is clear that we want good relations with Israel, At the same time, we see steps the Israeli government is taking that really raise questions. That’s why I think it’s important to have this open and frank dialogue, so we can address these issues with our Israeli counterparts, which we are constantly doing."

"We see no role for Hamas in the future governance of Gaza – that is very, very clear. And we also hope that the suffering of the people in Gaza will end, that humanitarian aid will reach them, and that both parties will be able to foster prosperity for the people moving forward."

"If people have opportunities – if they can earn a livelihood – then there’s a chance they won’t be radicalized, and chaos in Syria can be avoided."

"But the recent actions go beyond self-defense. There is too much human suffering."

"I can tell you that one of those countries wanted to send the military to march there [in Moscow]. Can you imagine? This is the biggest threat that Europe has: Russia. You want to join the EU, and then you send your military to march together with the forces that are actually attacking European security? How can you then really defend this and say that we want to take this military enemy within? It would be a complete no-go for many European countries, and it is hard. Show me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are. We have 27 Member States in Europe, and I can already tell you 10 [Member States] for whom this is highly problematic."

"The EU accession process must not be held hostage by such a conflict, We aim to avoid such tensions, but the EU will continue to enlarge whether or not this conflict is resolved."

"Europe is a peace project. You know, it was created so that we wouldn't have wars between the members of European Union, and we haven't had. And, of course, also to do things together, cooperate more. You know, coming from a country that joined the European Union 20, 20 years ago. Then, we were actually, you know, pushed by the Americans, you know, you will not get into NATO, but, but Europe, the European Union, is something that you should join because it's, it's a good project also for the transatlantic relations. So I was quite surprised to hear a comment like that."

"During the twenty past centuries our Christians from the Holy Land were like condemned and privileged to share oppression, persecution and suffering with Christ. He is risen but his cross is still high in our sky. Our Christianity is still hanging on that terrible cross. They still live under daily threats from officials who dream continuing the transfer of our minority, away from their lands, their homes, away from their ancestral homeland. If it was not for Him, the cross would have been damned and hated."

"The biggest and saddest impact of colonialism was the Irish language, but funnily enough, the way the Irish speak English has a load of phrases taken straight from the Irish language, some of them in ways we don’t realise. Colonialism was devastating and the effects are still going on, but in the true Irish spirit, in spite of people living in boháns and hovels, and people dying with the hunger, we’ve survived, and it’s only in the last thirty or forty years that we’ve begun to recover from the Famine, and Irish people got a bit of pride back into themselves. There’s a bit more about us now, than there was when we were always looking back."

"A teller forgets they’re performing. You have to learn the trade, do it and make mistakes. You make mistakes and remember them, but you do good things and remember them. The very most basic thing of all, is when you have a story you enjoy so much telling, you remember it, and you hardly have to think about it."

"I'm very pro-democracy, and I would definitely encourage the people of Egypt. But at the same time I would warn them to look at and learn from Iran, Mubarak has destroyed the opposition in Egypt; the only opposition left is the Muslim Brotherhood. And while I certainly can't say that the [democracy movement] will lead to another dictatorship, I am saying there's a possibility - a real danger - that it will go the wrong way. So I'd ask them to please learn from history. Iranians are still suffering from a revolution that turned into much more of a dictatorship than the Shah's. So please don't dismiss the possibility that things can go wrong."

"They have said that the Qur'an, which was a book for reading, understanding and salvation, should not know its meaning except for the Imams, and thus they have despised that book. Shiite scholars considered the Qur'an incomprehensible to the general public and preferred "hadiths" to it."

"The Europeans have been trying for years to keep the Orientals in the well of ignorance, and they have come to one conclusion from this behavior: the Orientals become powerless and helpless in the shadow of this ignorance."

"Curses and insults about the companions of the Prophet, which they called "Tabarra", is another basis of Shiism, and this is a disgraceful ugliness. Shiite books are full of curses and insults."

"The basis of Shiism is that the caliph should be chosen by God and not by the people. We ask: What was the reason for this? The book of Islam was the Qur'an, where is the Qur'an in such a statement? How could there be such a thing and it is not mentioned in the Qur'an?"

"If the Prophet wanted to appoint a "caliph", he must first speak on the fact that the selection and appointment of a caliph should be from God and not from the people, and he must said openly: "Now is my first caliph It is Ali who has been chosen by God.""

"Our words have deep strong roots, and will never be eradicated with a pistol. There will be no better result from using a pistol than bloodshed. Say and write whatever you like, we will never be offended, but your support for thugs has a different meaning."

"We know that when Nader Shah was killed, the greatness he had created for Iran disappeared. But Iran was still considered one of the so-called countries, and Karim Khan and his successors, if they did not add anything to the country, did not reduce it. But during the Qajar dynasty, Iran became very powerless, and its greatness, position and reputation were greatly diminished, and the reason for this was more than one thing, and that was that the world was modernized and countries changed, but Iran was backward."

"As we have seen, they created a small group of constitutionalists in Iran, and many people did not know the meaning of constitutionalism, and it is clear that they did not want it either. At the beginning of its rise, the constitutional movement, above all, had the character of "Shiism" in order to gradually acquire the character of "patriotism". This duplicity also appeared in the newspapers, and the newspaper Sur-e Esrafil followed this new practice from the very beginning, and its writers showed a good knowledge of the history of Europe and the countries there, and over this innovation, animosities arose with them."

"If we want the truth, these scholars of Najaf and Sayyids and other scholars who insisted on constitutionalism did not know the true meaning of the constitution and the result of the prevalence of European laws, and did not know the very obvious incompatibility between the constitution and the Shiites. The brave men, on the one hand, saw the distress of Iran and the inability of the government, and saw no other way out of it than the constitution and the parliament, and tried to support it with great insistence, and on the other hand, were bound by religion and could not ignore it."

"Regarding Reza Shah, it should be said: Many of the benevolent ideals of Iran were fulfilled by Reza Shah, from founding the National Bank, overthrowing the capitulation, unifying the clothes, railways, etc., to liberating women and removing the veil and chador."

"All Iranians with little knowledge are concerned about the country's backwardness - especially the decline of Iran from a large and powerful empire to a weak and small state. Where is the root of degeneration? At the turn of the century, intellectuals could claim that the main culprits were tyrants who had a hidden interest in the illiteracy and ignorance of the people of the country. But in fact, twenty years after the constitutional government, we can not give the same answer. We now know that the main fault lies not with the rulers but with the obedient. Yes, the main cause of underdevelopment in Iran, and perhaps in most Eastern countries, is division and discord among the masses."

"Kasravi wore a black turban at the time, wore a long robe and cloak, and wore a black cloak. His small compact turban was the best representative of Tabrizi students. His skinny face showed prominent bones, a look of suffering and anger, and at the same time a tyrant to the vote and Egypt in belief. He was not wearing glasses yet. He spoke Persian with a special Azerbaijani accent, but very well. In the first conversation I had with him, it was proved to me that the man is very fearless and even expresses his own opinions with a certain recklessness. He was not afraid to say anything against the custom and against the opinion of others."

"a true anti-cleric."

"When I was in Tehran, on the one hand, I became acquainted with the Esperantist group, and on the other hand, I became acquainted with the Baha'is. When I went to Mashhad, I wished to go to Nader Shah's grave. When I left, I was very sorry to see that they had turned it into a sleeping place for camels. When I arrived, a man with an Aftabeh came out. This upset me a lot. In Mashhad, I wrote a speech and sent it to a newspaper that I do not know whether it was published or not. A year later, in Tabriz, I wrote another speech in the newspaper Tajaddad. Bahman Mirza Sheydani, who represented the Great Association of Esperanto, had read it. Therefore, when there was a conversation in the National Assembly about Nader Shah's grave and a law was passed to clean it up, the prince wrote me a letter in which he gave good news. We got acquainted from there and sometimes we sent letters. In Tehran, he told me one day: I want you to learn Esperanto and become Esperantist. I said: I know Esperanto. He said: From whom did you read? I said I learned it myself. He was very pleased and invited me to the assemblies of the great association of Esperanto. One day he arranged a magnificent party for me."

"Kasravi has the spirit of an honest historian. He is meticulous in detail and in presentation"

"My father, like his father, had studied Sharia, but had become a businessman. He was a Shiite but avoided many superstitions. There were many differences between Sunnis and Shiites at that time. Especially in Azerbaijan, where hearts were full of resentment against Sunnis and this caused ugly behavior. For example, on the ninth of Rabi al-Awal, they celebrated the day of Omar's death, thinking that it was the day of his death, and engaged in a series of light-hearted work. Clear such ignorance from Iran, the constitutional movement, and that is why Iranians should be happy that that movement is happend."

"Cholera broke out and people hung the Quran in the streets at that time, so that anyone who passed under it would take refuge from the disease, and they set up Rawda Khwani in the gates and alleys. One day, one of the grandchildren of an ayatollah was put on a donkey and brought to our alley, and the men and women kissed his hand."

"In Hokmavar, because many people were illiterate, they did not value literacy and there was no Maktab there. Only one mullah named Mullah Bakhshali taught us to read the Qur'an. He himself was not very literate and did not know Persian well, and because his teeth were missing, his words were difficult to understand. His art was to beat the hands and feet of children. People did not want anything more than this and saw education in beating children. However, from the day I went to Maktab, I did not give up because I wanted knowledge until I understood the lesson. I learned the alphabet in a week. Then I learned some lessons in Quranic chapters from mullah Bakhshali and learned the rest myself."

"I never wanted to be known and my name to be mentioned. But whether or not this happened, it was very appropriate for me to write my own life history so that there would be no need for others to make incomplete inquiries and get a combination of right and wrong."

"Our family in Tabriz was a mullah family. Aqa Mir Ahmad, my grandfather, was one of the famous scholars who was followed by all the people. He built a mosque in Hakmavar, which is now standing and is called Mirahmad Mosque. As I have heard, he was a very humble man and he was kind and sympathetic to people. When I was a child, even though thirty years had passed since his death, his memory was still alive among the people. Mir Ahmad's youngest son, my father, chooses to stay away from the mullah. My father wanted to have a child to succeed his father, so he named me Mir Ahmad."

"I had to become a mullah after studying, and apart to my father's will, I hated the mullah myself."

"From childhood to the age of six, I do not remember anything but shaving my head and suffering from it."

"If you have heard that Dr. Zamenhof has created a language called Esperanto from the rules of knowledge, the ease of which is amazing, we should follow the same rules in adorning the Persian language and make this language very easy."

"Today, one of the problems of Iran, in fact, its worst problem, is the dispersal of Iranians. People who share a common land and live within the territory of one country should not be divided into rival sects. Today's Iran is in this misery, and if this continues, God knows what a hard hand the Iranians will suffer."

"There is no doubt that our alphabet must be changed. It has been talked about for fifty years, and now it must be used, and it is the most worthy group to use. If we do not use it today, it will either remain unfulfilled or fall into the wrong hands of those who have created something flawed and called it the alphabet."

"The work of the word should not be despised, whoever turns to goodness, his word should also be trimmed and adorned. Language is the mirror of thoughts, language is the example of temperament"

"It is the responsibility of literate writers to try to cut down on Arabic words, and for others to follow them. The involvement of inexperienced youth in this work will bring no other benefit than loss and will create a series of other destructions in Persian."

"Haji Mir Abolhassan Angji - The cowardly mullah who once threw himself in front of the constitutionalists and spread his false ideas in support of them, and then in the occupation of Tabriz by the Russians, he fell in front of the mob and looted the city.- excommunicated me because he had heard my attachments to constitutionalism."

"a novel is patient and daily work, like embroidering a tapestry of many colors. You go slowly, you have a pattern in mind. But all of a sudden you turn it and realize that it’s something else."

"Happy endings usually don't work for me. I like open endings. I trust the reader’s imagination."

"To me a short story is like an arrow; it has to have the right direction from the beginning and you have to know exactly where you're aiming."

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc. Many Russian novelists influenced me as well: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov, Gogol, and Bulgarov. The English writers who had a big influence on me during my adolescence were Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. I loved mysteries and read all of Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle. Also some American authors who were very popular in Spanish, like Mark Twain, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. I remember the lasting impression that Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird had on me. I read that book again every decade or so. From these books I got a sense of plot and strong characters. I discovered fantasy and eroticism in One Thousand and One Nights, which I read in Lebanon at age fourteen. At that time and in that place, girls didn't have much social life aside from school and family; we didn't even go to the movies. My only escape from a troublesome family life was reading. My stepfather had four mysterious leather volumes in his locked closet, forbidden books that I was not supposed to see because they were “erotic.” Of course I found a way to copy the key and get in the closet when he was not around. I used a flashlight, could not mark the pages, and read quickly, skipping pages and looking for the dirty parts. My hormones were raging and my imagination went wild with those fantastic tales. When critics call me a Latin America Sheherazade I feel very flattered! The American and European feminists that I read in my twenties gave me an articulate language to express the anger I felt against the patriarchy in which we all live. I started working at Paula, a Chilean feminist magazine, sharpening my ideas and my pen to defy the male establishment. It was the best time of my life. I have always liked movies, and sometimes an image or a scene or a character stays with me for years and inspires me when I write. For example: the magic in Fanny and Alexander or the story within a story of Shakespeare in Love."

"The soul has no age."

"Pain is universal. We all experience pain, loss, and death the same way."

"It’s strange that my work has been classified as magic realism because I see my novels as just being realistic literature. They say that if Kafka had been born in Mexico he would have been a realistic writer. So much depends on where you were born."

"I imagined the structure of the novel like a braid. My job was to blend three strands evenly and neatly. Each piece of the braid represented one of the stories. The characters were very different but they had something in common: they were emotionally wounded by events of their past."