Best 13 quotes of Suheir Hammad on MyQuotes

Do not fear what has blown up. If you must, fear the unexploded.

i cried when i saw those buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart.

I do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill. I have never been so hungry that I willed hunger. I have never been so angry as to want to control a gun over a pen. Not really. Even as a woman, as a Palestinian, as a broken human being. Never this broken.

I think of feminism as a socially just and imaginative world.

I understand now my father really thought he was doing me good. Education means a lot to Palestinians. We’ve become some of the most educated people in the world through our diaspora. We’ve had to be. When you ain’t got land, your degree may be your only solid ground. May father felt (feels) that being a doctor would give me security. How can I explain that I’m not safe from anything if I don’t write?

I will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than death.

Life is a right, not collateral or casual.

The machine will grind you down, but the machine is not bigger than the imagination. Rome fell in a day. We know this.

War and tooth enameled salted lemon childhoods All colors run, none of us solid Don't look for shadow behind me I carry it within I live cycles of light and darkness

Your war drum ain't / louder than this breath.

a woman will tell you every home she has ever inhabited has been broken into starting with her body

... in the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves through grief.

Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician. Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there. Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16. A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death. A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you. Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water. And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.