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“There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers.”
- Paul

If you need something to worship, then worship life—all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!

“We’ve lost that clear, single-note of living. If it cannot be bottled, beaten, pointed, or hoarded, we give it no value.”
- Paul

“I don’t want to be part of history…I just want to be loved…and to love.”
- Alia

There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness…what senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?

“I’ve seen those who seek signs and omens for their individual destiny. They fear what they seek…men always fear things which move by themselves…you fear your own power. Things fall into your head from nowhere. When they fall out, where do they go?”
- Hayt

Once…long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into ancient forms.

“To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.”
- Hayt

“Ideas are most to be feared when they become actions”
- Paul

“…some lies are easier to believe than the truth.”
- Irulan

“The contradiction of using Israeli paint to scribble our anti-occupation graffiti was becoming so insufferable as to make an explosion inevitable.”
- Sari Nusseibeh

“Our revolutionary vanguards burst out, believing in the armed revolution as the way to Return and to Liberty, in order to stress to the colonialists and their henchmen, and to world Zionism and its financiers, that the Palestinian people remains in the field; that it has not died and will not die.”
- al-Asifa

We have found the Algerian Muslim nation...This community has its history, full of great feats. It has its religious and linguistic unity. It has its own culture, its habits and customs, good or bad, like all nations. Moreover, this Algerian and Muslim nation is not France. It would not know how to be France. It does not want to become France. It could not become France, even if it wanted to.
- Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis

“Do we wish to become a nation in the real and whole sense of the word? Or to conserve ourselves as a laughable mix of communities, always separate from each other like hostile tribes? We must furnish ourselves a unique unifying symbol: a nationality. That flower can never thrive in the shadow of steeples and minarets, but only under a flag.”
- Alphonse Zenié, Le Réveil

You who cherish the homeland
Revolt against the outright oppression
Liberate the homeland from the kings
Liberate it from the puppets
I thought we had kings who could lead the men behind them
- Abu Salman

There was no way to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…Palestine would prove Britain’s gravest imperial failure in the Middle East, a failure that would condemn the whole of the Middle East to conflict and violence that persists to the present day.

When we meet, we will complain
Of our afflictions, that day,
For the feelings of the heart
No messenger can convey,
Nor is the voicing of grief
Keeping the feelings at bay.
No messenger knows
How to say what I can say.
- The Story of the Hunchback

Travel, and new friends will succeed the friends you lost,
And toil, for life's sweets do through toil come.
To stay wins you no honor nor from exile saves;
Set out to roam the world and leave your home.
When water stands, it stagnant turns and stinks
But tastes so sweet when it does flow and run.
- The Story of the Two Viziers

Many a lover his beloved tells
With his eyes’ language what is in his heart.
“I know what has befallen,” seems to say,
And with a glance he does his thoughts impart.
How lovely are the glances of the eyes,
How graceful are the eyes with passion fraught.
One with his looks a lover’s message writes,
Another with his eyes reads what his lover wrote.
- The Second Dervish’s Tale

The unrelenting Egyptian sun has bleached the gods’ once gaudy temples into romantic sand-colored tumbledown ruins. Tombs have been stripped of their treasures, pyramids of their shimmering capstones. But the allure of pharaonic civilization, embodied in the Western consciousness by its last queen, has proved altogether more resilient.

I had the river mouth prepared like a strong wall, with warships, troop carriers, and merchant vessels. They were all crewed from bow to stern with brave soldiers, fully armed. The infantry comprised every Egyptian recruit. They were like lions roaring on the mountaintops.
- Inscription of Ramesses III

Everyone who has passed by since you founded the earth,
You have raised them for your son,
The one who has come from your body,
The dual king who lives on truth, the lord of the Two Lands…the son of Ra who lives on truth,…Akhenaten, whose life is long;
And the king's great wife, whom he loves,
The lady of the Two Lands,
Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, living and youthful forever and ever.
- Great Hymn to the Aten

“I call to attention the people who shall live in the future, who shall consider this monument that I made for my father…Now my mind turned this way and that, anticipating the words of the people who shall see my monument in future years and speak of what I have done…He shall not declare what I have said to be an exaggeration. Rather, he will say, ‘How like her it is, loyal to her father!’”
- Hatshepsut

“He trod [the earth’s] end in might and victory seeking a fight, but he found no one who would stand up to him.”
“I made Egypt the chief, and the whole earth her servants.”
- Thutmose I victory inscriptions

La memoria es el deseo satisfecho
hoy que tu vida y tu destino son la misma cosa.

Decidirás, escogerás uno de los caminos, sacrificarás los demás: te sacrificarás al escoger, dejarás de ser todos los otros hombres—otro—cumpla por ti la vida que mutilaste al elegir: al elegir sí, al elegir no, al permitir que no tu deseo, idéntico a tu libertad, te señalara un laberinto sino tu interés, tu miedo, tu orgullo.

Vivir es traicionar a tu Dios; cada acto de la vida, cada acto que nos afirma como seres vivos, exige que se violen los mandamientos de tu Dios.

Que tu existencia será fabricada con todos los hilos del telar, como las vidas de todos los hombres. Que no te faltará, ni te sobrará, una sola oportunidad para hacer de tu vida lo que quieres que sea. Y si serás una cosa y no la otra, será porque, a pesar de todo, tendrás que elegir. Tus elecciones no negarán en resto de tu posible vida…hoy tu elección y tu destino serán una misma cosa.

“Some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.”
- Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

“There are souls that in their narrowness blame the whole world. But overwhelm such a soul with mercy, give it love, and it will curse what it has done, for there are so many germs of good in it.”
- Fetyukovich