{"quotes":[{"text":"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?","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["colonialism","french","french-colonialism","french-morocco","lies","morocco","moslem","nazarene","politics","politique","sins","truth"],"id":1106,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"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.","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["colonialism","easy","french-morocco","god","hate","morocco"],"id":25944,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"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.","author":"Raquel Cepeda","tags":["ancestors","ancestry","build","building-blocks","globe-trotting","inspiration","journey","life-experience","morocco","sahara","sahara-desert","sand","spiritual-journey","trek","trekking"],"id":41471,"author_id":"Raquel+Cepeda"},{"text":"Food stall owners reach out with menus, calling out their dinner selections like midway prizes.","author":"Vicki Alayne Bradley","tags":["adventure","culinary","exotic","food","morocco","world-travel"],"id":57385,"author_id":"Vicki+Alayne+Bradley"},{"text":"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.","author":"Raquel Cepeda","tags":["amazigh-girl","atlas-mountains","morocco","patriarchy","travel","traveling"],"id":87029,"author_id":"Raquel+Cepeda"},{"text":"If Aphrodite chills at home in Cyprus for most of the year, then Fez must be the goddess’s playground.","author":"Raquel Cepeda","tags":["aphrodite","aphrodite-s-playground","beauty","cyprus","fes","fez","inspiration","inspired-travel","morocco","travel","traveling"],"id":102059,"author_id":"Raquel+Cepeda"},{"text":"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.","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["archetypes","colonialism","custom","french-morocco","individual-variation","individuation","islam","morocco","society","stereotypes","tradition","variation"],"id":113543,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one’s memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.","author":"Roman Payne","tags":["arabesque","book","book-of-oneself","book","exploration","exploration","marrakech","marrakech","marrakesh","marrakesh","medina","moroccan-literature","morocco","morrocan","roman-payne","roman-payne","sahara-desert","saharan-soliloquy","the-arabesque","the-writing-life","the-writing-process","travel","travel-writing","writers","writers-and-writing","writers-inspiration","writers-life","writers-on-writing","writers","writers-world"],"id":118150,"author_id":"Roman+Payne"},{"text":"There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate.' (But it's hard to feign innocence if you've eaten the apple, he reflected.) 'And it looks to me as if it is going to go on, because the French aren't going to give in, and certainly the Arabs aren't, because they can't. They're fighting with their backs the the wall.'I thought maybe you meant you expected a new world war,' he lied.'That's the least of my worries. When that comes, we've had it. You can't sit around mooning about Judgement Day. That's just silly. Everybody who ever lived has always had his own private Judgment Day to face anyway, and he still has. As far as that goes, nothing's changed at all.","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["colonialism","eden","french","independence","innocence","judgment-day","morocco","paradise-lost","revolution","unrest","uprising"],"id":146533,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"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.","author":"Elias Canetti","tags":["marrakech","morocco","travel"],"id":172259,"author_id":"Elias+Canetti"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}