“I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and -peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise.”— Aurora Levins Morales
“…It is only now that memory works both ways. Which of us dreamed it – those from the country of nights five times as warm and as cold, or those who turned away and woke?”— Angele Ellis
“Living in a world where people measure their happiness by self-indulgence and decadence, Is like watching a whole society being pushed into the abyss of perpetual decay and aberrations.”— Husam Wafaei
“You will breathe throughout your life, every moment of it, but an opportunity like this comes once in a lifetime, and not even to everyone. Go for it!”— K. Hari Kumar
“I wish I had lost an arm or a leg. It would have been much easier than losing a part of my heart, which lives on, but now beats to a different rhythm.”— Zeina Kassem
“That’s when it hit me; my sunglasses were buried in the grave where my Talal lay. Yes, my sunglasses were buried with him. But oh, how I wish my eyes had gone with him instead.”— Zeina Kassem
“Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab – its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians – none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we’re indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he’s the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him.”— Diana Abu-Jaber
“I am from Lebanon, from Beirut and SaidaI am from the ground underneath my home I am from the trees, the cedar treeI come from Tabouleh and brown eyes, from Karim…Kassar and KassemI come from happiness and cultureFrom “Habibi” and “Hayete”I am from all religionsI am from the room beneath the stars.”— Zeina Kassem
“I could only liken it to the strength of a wheat stalk, which when struck by a storm, bends to the ground, but does not break. This stalk of wheat stands tall like a spear in a tempest, clinging to the earth where its roots are embedded deep, embracing the sun from which it draws life.”— Zeina Kassem
“The participation if women in some armies in the world is in reality only symbolic. The talk about the role of Zionist women in fighting with the combat units of the enemy in the war of 5 June 1967 was intended more as propaganda than anything real or substantial. It was calculated to intensify and compound the adverse psychological effects of the war by exploiting the backward outlook of large sections of Arab society and their role in the community. The intention was to achieve adverse psychological effects by saying to Arabs that they were defeated, in 1967, by women.”— Saddam Hussein
“And I withdrew into myself when I understood that they wanted to extract every thought in my head, one by one, like decayed teeth.”— Alia Mamdouh
“Don’t be afraid of books, even the most dissident, seemingly ‘immoral’ ones. Culture is a sure bet in life, whether high, low, eclectic, pop, ancient or modern. And I am convinced that reading is one of the most important tools of liberation that any human being, and a contemporary Arab woman in particular, can exploit. I am not saying it is the ONLY tool, especially with all the new alternative – more visual, interactive and hasty – ways of knowledge, learning and growth. But how could I not be convinced of literature’s power, when it has been my original emancipator?”— Joumana Haddad
“By the time of the arrival of Islam in the early seventeenth century CE, what we now call the Middle East was divided between the Persian and Byzantine empires. But with the spread of this new religion from Arabia, a powerful empire emerged, and with it a flourishing civilization and a glorious golden age.Given how far back it stretches in time, the history of the region — and even of Iraq itself — is too big a canvas for me to paint. Instead, what I hope to do in this book is take on the nonetheless ambitious task of sharing with you a remarkable story; one of an age in which great geniuses pushed the frontiers of knowledge to such an extent that their work shaped civilizations to this day.”— Jim Al-Khalili
“I always have believed that we should not call it an Arab-Israeli issue or a Palestinian-Arab dispute or a peace negotiation. I think we should call it what it is: an occupation of Palestine, full stop. This is not a popular position in mixed company.”— Talal Abu-Ghazaleh