FALLACI, Oriana

INSHALLAH

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Satisfied, she paused for a thousandth of a second, the time to catch her breath, look around, understand where she was. Then she proceeded in search of the agreeable place in which to explode, and broke into the hippocampus which is the center of memory. Here she found a vault with the remembrance of a childhood which had left nothing to remember but the useless and thoughtless freedom of kids, the the recollection of a squalid adolescence: a taste of youth made melancholic by the awareness of being ugly and mistreated by everybody.

“Come here, get-over-here, do-what-I-tell-you”. She also found the dark image of a basement lit by a tiny window.

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Maybe he couldn't bear the dejection of having proved a fact that even newborns divine, the invincibility of death, and out of consistency he surrendered to it before his time. Or maybe he concluded that, besides constituting the inevitable goal of every thing and every creature, Death is a relief: a repose. And out of impatience, or out of exhaustion, he ran up to it. Could I imitate him? Well, though I can't deny that sometimes Death offers repose or relief, though what we think and desire today doesn't usually correspond to what we'll think or desire tomorrow because every tomorrow is a trap of ugly surprises, my answer is no. I don't think I could run up to Death for impatience or exhaustion. Unless... No, no... I'll never yield, I'll never bend, to its invincibility. I'm too certain that Life is the measure of all, the mainspring of all, the goal of all. And I hate Death too much. I hate it as much as I hate solitude, suffering, pain and the word goodbye..

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La Rabbia e l’Orgoglio / The Rage and the Pride

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It is the Mountain. That Mountain which in one thousand and four hundred years has not moved, has not risen from the abyss of its blindness, has not opened its doors to the conquests of civilization, has never wanted to know about freedom and democracy and progress. In short, has not changed. That Mountain which in spite of the shameful richness of its retrograde masters (kings and princes and sheiks and bankers) still lives in scandalous poverty, still vegetates in the monstrous darkness of a religion which produces nothing but religion. That Mountain which drowns into illiteracy (don’t forget that in every Moslem country the percentage of illiteracy surpasses sixty percent). That Mountain which gets information only through the backward Imams or the cartoon strips. That Mountain which, secretly envious of us, unconfessedly jealous of our way of life, throws upon us the responsibility of its material and intellectual miseries.

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But, by God, they( the Americans )’re redeemed. And there is nothing in this world stronger and more powerful than redeemed plebes. You always break your horns against the redeemed Plebiscite. And they all broke their horns against America. The English, the Germans, the Mexicans, the Russians, nazis, fascists, communists. Last but not least the Vietnamese broke them when after their victory they had to get down on all fours so that when an ex-president of the United States goes to make them a little visit they touch the sky with a finger.

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They’re everywhere, and the most highly trained among them are precisely in the West. In our cities, our streets, our universities, in the nerve centers of our technology. That technology that any dullard can manipulate. The Crusade has been under way for some time. And it works like a Swiss watch, sustained by a faith and a perfidy comparable only to the faith and perfidy of Torquemada when he carried out the Inquisition. Clearly to negotiate with them is impossible. To reason with them, unthinkable. To treat them with indulgence or tolerance or hope, suicide. Whoever believes the contrary is deluded.

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Lettera a un bambino mai nato / Letter to a child unborn

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One day you and I will have to have a little talk about this business called love. I still don't understand what it's all about. My guess is that it's just a gigantic hoax, invented to keep people quiet and diverted. Everyone talks about love: the priests, the advertising posters, the literati, and the politicians, those of them who make love. And in speaking of love and offering it as a panacea for every tragedy, they would and betray and kill both body and soul.

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To be good or bad doesn't count: life out in this world doesn't depend on that. It depends on a relation of forces based on violence. And survival is violence. You'll wear leather shoes because someone has killed a cow and skinned it to make leather.
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And yet, or just for this reason, it's so fascinating to be a woman. It's an adventure that takes such courage, a challenge that's never boring. You'll have so many things to engage you if you're born a woman. To begin with, you'll have to struggle to maintain that if God exists he might even be an old woman with white hair or a beautiful girl. Then you'll have to struggle to explain that it wasn't sin that was born on the day when Eve picked an apple, what was born that day was a splendid virtue called disobedience.

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You belong neither to God nor the state nor me. You belong to yourself and no one else.
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