Zaina

“It was obvious that the matter had to be settled, and evasions were distasteful to me.”
― Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

“[A]lthough guns, tanks, and bombs win wars, they don't win peace. Peace takes research, planning reconstruction, the secrets to which can be found in books.”
― Mike Thomson, Syria's Secret Library: Reading and Redemption in a Town Under Siege

“It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved — turned this way and that, examined, considered.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

“You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--”
― Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun