The Way to the Spring Quotes

“Memory,' wrote the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, is a process of organizing what to forget.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“Only once did I make Shireen sit down with me for a formal interview. She talked about the need to rebuild what she called "the culture of resistance" that she remembered experiencing during the Second Intifada, but which had since evaporated, replaced by a dull consumerist individualism, by "this illusion that if I forget about Palestine, build a career, take a loan, buy a car, build a house, watch Arab Idol on TV, it's all be okay; that if they're not raiding *your* house, you're okay." In a culture constructed around a shared goal of liberation, she said, "my house is your house and your son is my son and if they kill me today they will kill you tomorrow." (103)”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“The past was mainly rotten, but it appeared to have passed. The present was pure ebullient collapse. And the future? It hadn’t happened yet.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“Unanimity makes me itchy. It almost always hides a grave. I started digging.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine