Literary Birthday – 12 July – Elias Khoury

Elias Khoury was born 12 July 1948 and died 15 September 2024.

Elias Khoury Quotes

1. I do not believe that writing is an act of despair. On the contrary, it lies beyond despair, when a portal opens onto the darkness that is mixed with shades of light. In this darkness the ink lights up our souls and takes us to a place where we are both witness and agent, where witnessing broadens the horizons of the human situation – defending man’s right to live and dream, to rip the veil off taboos and to resist military and religious tyranny.
2. We don’t make the answers: we find them and when the answer is finally written down, we find it resembles the question, because writers, as I see it, are just readers who rewrite the story they have read in the eyes of others.
3. I write. And then I rewrite. And when I have a book that is finished, done, I don’t publish it. I rewrite it again, from zero. (via)
4. Poetry is another way to dream. That is the role of poets — to put into words what we cannot put into words. (via)
5. This isn’t the Palestinian flag. Palestine isn’t a country for it to have a flag. Palestine is a condition. Every Arab is a Palestinian. Every poor man who carries a gun is a Palestinian. Palestine is the condition of us all.

Elias Khoury was a Lebanese novelist, playwright, critic, and intellectual. He published 10 novels, including Gate of the Sun and White Masks, and he wrote three plays.

Source for some of the quotes

Source for image: Center for the Study of Europe Boston University from Boston, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Europe_Meets_the_Arab_World_with_Elias_Khoury_and_Jocelynne_Cesari%22_at_Boston_University_(cropped).jpg

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar