Suheir Hammad Quotes

I worry about Zimbabweans. They bend, they bend, they bend, they bend - where do the people break? How long can they go on scrounging for food in garbage dumps and using the moisture from sewage drains to plant vegetables?

I wanted to write something that reflected the violence and horror of the world, but I also wanted to reflect the way people fight to survive, even when society wants to crush them.

Losing a game is not a tragedy after experiencing border raids and having to eat beetles because you are out of rations.

Born down in a dead man's town, The first kick I took was when I hit the ground, You end up like a dog that's been beat too much, Till you spend half your life just covering up...

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes.

Growing up, my family was an enemy of the state. I have experienced more disappointment than joy, much more sad stories or desperate conditions.

I don't advocate senseless violence of any human being. I'm the one who's been beat down. But I will not be a victim again.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

Anybody who's been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they've thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major.

It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.

It's frightening to think about more sanctions. When I've met North Koreans in China, they've said to me, 'You have no idea how difficult our lives are. We live like dogs.' They wake up in the morning wondering what they're going to eat for dinner.

On the day when I was shot, and on the next day, people raised the banners of 'I am Malala'. They did not say 'I am Taliban.'

It makes me actually quite angry to think about people writing about torture with a sort of relish. Horrible.

I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.

I think the brutality is important to convey as part of the story, to see how brutal it is to have these kids in battle with one another.

I got hit a lot. I'm glad I lived through it.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

The power organisation of Israel gives what they can to fight me, to cause me some harm, damages in health, mind, and they succeed little bit, but I survived and I am now free, but it was very hard - a very difficult time - and I wish no one would suffer what I suffered, and then when I speak to you and try to be human being like everyone.

War can be fun for certain people. It's a magnet for sadists, losers, and angry dreamers.

When you have a situation that's destructive, when there's tremendous inhumanity everywhere, you see how humanity survives in all of its different permutations.

My mind revolts and my soul cannot support the weight of so much evil: theft, rape, pillage, deaths, and murders, fires and devastation; the virgin violated, the cry of the widow and the orphan; the father armed against his son and each one looking for his brother to kill him; of those who have migrated; of the thousands who have fled; of the bodies stretched out in the public streets; of the bones which cover the fields and of so much blood shed on Venezuela’s soil.

A more shocking scene cannot be imagined, than that witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains. The bones of those who had died and been devoured by the miserable ones that still survived were lying around their tents and cabins. Bodies of men, women and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side. A woman sat by the body of her husband, who had just died, eating out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eat! The daughter was seen eating the flesh of the father - the mother that of her children - children that of father and mother. The emaciated, wild, and ghastly appearance of the survivors, added to the horror of the scene. Language cannot describe the awful change that a few weeks of dire suffering had wrought in the minds of these wretched and pitiable beings. Those who but one month before would have shuddered and sickened at the thought of eating human flesh, or of killing their companions and relatives to preserve their own lives, now looked upon the opportunity by these acts afforded them of escaping the most dreadful of deaths …

It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

The brutality of apartheid drains you of that emotion of fear if you have gone through everything you can be put through in the process of harassment.