Arab Quotes

“...and he laughed a laugh she loved more than the warmest of fires on the coldest of nights.”
― Hafsah Faizal, We Hunt the Flame

“But eyes couldn’t stay closed forever, unless one was dead. And the dead never dreamed.”
― Hafsah Faizal, We Hunt the Flame

“I am the lover's gift; I am the wedding wreath;
I am the memory of a moment of happiness;
I am the last gift of the living to the dead;
I am a part of joy and a part of sorrow.”
― Gibran Kahlil Gibran

“A monster. For a monster will always be enslaved to a master.”
― Hafsah Faizal, We Hunt the Flame

“أما العمل الأخطر فهو أن تحضر مهرجانًا شعريًّا يؤمّه هذا الطّراز من الشّعراء، عامّة هناك نوعان من الشّعر حاليًّا... شعر (أتدحرج عبر الطّرقات الشّتويّة... تختفي أزمنة اللّاجدوى...) [...] النّوع الثّاني من الشّعر السّائد حاليًّا هو (مات الّذي قد كان نبراسًا... من بعده ساد الأسى النّاسا)... سوف تسمع الكثير جدًّا من هذا الكلام حتّى ينفجر رأسك، ثمّ يظهر ناقد يمطّ شفته السّفلى في قرف ويتكلّم عن: "البنية الإبداعيّة الكوزموبوليتانيّة في إرهاصات ما بعد الحداثة. هذه هي الممارسة المنهجيّة القوليّة الّقديّة تشكف عن نفسها داخل الطّرح البنيويّ".”
― أحمد خالد توفيق, فقاقيع

“The beauty of the sea is that it never shows any weakness and never tires of the countless souls that unleash their broken voices into its secret depths.”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“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, The Revolution and Woman in Iraq

“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, I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman

“Based on the considerations of history, ancient history, and international axioms, the logic of following up a citizen with his shadow for the purpose of the demarcation of political frontiers of any state has been discounted for international conventions. For example the Arabs cannot ask Spain just because they were there some time in the past nor can they ask for any other area outside the frontiers of the Arab homeland”
― Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein on Current Events in Iraq

“It is not in our hands to prevent the murder of workers… and families… but it is in our hands to fix a high price for our blood, so high that the Arab community and the Arab military forces will not be willing to pay it.”
― Moshe Dayan

“The loneliness of the arab is a terrible thing; it is all consuming. It is already present like a little shadow under the heart when he lays his head on his mother's lap; it threatens to swallow him whole when he leaves his own country, even though he marries and travels and talks to friends twenty-four hours a day. That is the way Sirine suspects that Arabs feel everything - larger than life, feelings walking in the sky.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“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

“...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

“You gave me books and articles. You keep telling me not to forget I'm Arab. But it's not just the white people reminding me who I am, Baba. Arabs remind me I'm not one of them too. This world may never let me forget I am Arab, but it will also keep me from belonging as one of them.”
― Aminah Mae Safi, Not the Girls You're Looking For

“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, Crescent

“There wasn’t a question of what compromise there should be or what kind of peace process we should engage in. There was only one discussion: How do we remove the colonial power that is occupying our
country?”
― Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, Blankets become Jackets

“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, Blankets become Jackets

“My trauma is no longer what I define myself by, and it has taken a lot of therapy, self-love, and depression naps for me to get to that point. I define myself by a set of different virtues: the fact that I am a decent writer, the fact that I am a resilient person who has found healing, the fact that I am goofy as hell, the fact that after decades of being understood by everyone as white, I’m finally beginning to explore what it means to be an Arab American, the fact that I was eating my grandmother’s hummus way before white people decided hummus was cool.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“You would think that honour has been reconciled to its lexical origins or bravery, glory and honesty. Yet, a special entry in the social glossary has reserved it exclusively to an organ that is safely nestled between a woman’s legs, and upon its compromise, which is a common male practice, hell and damnation befall the legs and their owner, never the invader.”
― Fatima Mohammed, Higher Heels, Bigger Dreams

“In our country we use different words [than feminism] which mean the liberation or the emancipation of women. Of course I believe in the emancipation of women. It will change a lot of things in society for the better.
But, you know, the class patriarchal system under which we live oppresses men too and the discrimination from which women suffer is not good for the life of men. Don’t you think so?”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Walking through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words

“Every Jew in Palestine is a bit of an Arab, and no Arab in Israel can deny that he's a little Jewish.”
― Yasmina Khadra, The Attack

“What language / do you speak at home? / What is this / flavor called? / How do you say it? / Where are the women?”
― Raya Tuffaha, To All the Yellow Flowers

“Racial discrimination might not be systemic within the Arab governments’ fabric but that does not mean they are devoid of discriminatory laws and the same can be said about their cultural one, for the Arab world can in no way be absolved of the sin that at its core resides many a prejudice.”
― Aysha Taryam

“People in Europe or the United States often ask blithely, where are the Muslims and Arabs speaking out against extremism and terrorism? It is deeply troubling to expect that all Muslims should apologize or take responsibility for a minuscule fraction of those who share their faith. Furthermore, the question ignores the devastating sacrifices of those who have been fighting intolerance and its violent manifestations within their own countries long before anyone in the West even thought to pose the question.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“One of my biggest worries is that youth grow in discomfort and insecurity, which stops them from truly dreaming freely. society, religion, and family should be the source of support, not the horror.”
― Mohammed Zaid

“We evolve through Science Fiction”
― Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely

“Among the papers and refuse swirled about by the wind were a few verses of La Bella Gigugin transformed into a kind a f Arab wail, a fare to which any gay tune sung in Sicily is bound to succumb.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“إنْ كنت شُجاعًا بما يكفي لتقُل وداعًا بعدما كُنت جالسًا على مقعدٍ عزيزٍ، فلتكن شجاعًا أيضًا بما يكفي للاعتذار والعودة إذا أدركت قيمة هذا المقعد بعد الرّحيل، وعُد إليه قائلًا: "مرحبًا، أعتذر، تنح جانبًا، أريد الجلوس على مقعدي"، سأقول لك: "تفضّل، إنّه دائمًا مقعدك، وللأبد".”
― حسين علي السنافي

“Mishal Al Balushi was a bundle of anxiety that was trying its very best.”
― Ammar Al Naaimi, Hazim