Sinai Tapestry Quotes

“A gesture then, a photograph now, a cloak threadbare and resplendent from century to century. And the unsuspecting weavers of the cloak, spirits despised and triumphant, threads to the tapestry and names to the sands and seas, souls for recollection in the whispers of love that had come to weave the chaos of events into a whole and the decades into an era.

Love gentle and kind and ferocious, rich and starved and hallucinatory, damned and diseased and saintly. Love, the bewildering varieties of love. That and only that able to recall the lives lost in the spectacle, the hours forgotten in the dream.

Hopes and failures given to time, demons pressed into quietude, spirits released to memory in the chaotic book of life, a repetitious and contradictory Bible suggesting infinity, a Sinai tapestry of many colors.”
― Edward Whittemore, Sinai Tapestry

“People cut off love for all kinds of reasons but generally it has to do with them, not with somebody else.”
― Edward Whittemore, Sinai Tapestry

“From the decks of the warships the foreign sailors watched the massacre through binoculars and took pictures. The navy bands played late and phonographs were set up on the ships and aimed at the quay. Caruso sang from Pagliacci all night across a harbor filled with bloated corpses. An admiral going to dine on another ship was late because a woman’s body fouled his propeller.”
― Edward Whittemore, Sinai Tapestry

“It seems that’s it for me and what’s a soul to do then? What’s a soul to do?”

“Simply go on loving her.”

“So I seem to be doing but what’s the sense of it? Where does it lead?”

The frail hand tightened on his and then was gone. Haj Harun knelt in front of him and held him by the shoulders, his face serious.

“You’re still young, Prester John. Don’t you see it leads nowhere? It’s an end in itself.”
― Edward Whittemore, Sinai Tapestry

“No, no guns, they won’t get us anywhere. I tried that when I was young and it’s a useless interim game. Use guns and you’re no better than the Black and Tans and that’s not good enough.”
― Edward Whittemore, Sinai Tapestry