Desert Queen Quotes

“Great persons, like great empires, leave their mark on history.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“No one had asked her to marry him, nor was there someone she wished to wed. Not that she did not enjoy the company of young men; She did. But her sharp tongue sliced through their egos and her intellectual thirst quickly soaked up what drops of knowledge they shed.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“Then, as now, archaelogists and writers ventured where others feared to tread.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“After a while, when he finished telling his stories, they broke bread to bind their friendship and shared salt as a promise of his tribe’s protection.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“From the point of view of most of the Arabs, another foreign conqueror, heretic and Western, had come into their land, evicted their Muslim occupier and claimed the local people to have been liberated. Then, like all the others, it established itself as the ruling authority.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“The ultimate source of power, here as in the whole course of Arab history, is the personality of the commander. Through him, whether he be an Abbasid Khalif or an Amir of Nejd, the political entity holds, and with his disappearance it breaks.” The echo of her words would ring throughout the region for the rest of the century, in men like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“controlled the lives of two hundred”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“Faisal and Lawrence had come from London, where, on January 3, 1919, Faisal signed an agreement with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann on the principle of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“American President, Woodrow Wilson, whose idealistic thoughts were purely on his new concepts of the League of Nations and the mandate system. “The peoples of the world are awake and the peoples of the world are in the saddle,” Wilson would declare, hoping to spur the former territories of the Germans and the Turks to self-determination.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“When the Balfour Declaration was released to the public at the end of the year, Gertrude attacked it viciously. Sir Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, had written a letter to Lord Rothschild, leader of the Jewish community in England, promising “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration vowed not to prejudice “the civil and religious rights” of the Arabs already living in Palestine.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“What would happen if we withdrew? … After the enormous expenditure which we have incurred in freeing this country from the withering despotism of the Turk, to hand it back to anarchy and confusion, and to take no responsibility for its development would be an act of folly and quite indefensible.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

“But her role had changed; she was now available for marriage and her primary task was to find a mate. As Florence and Hugh Bell's daughter, she was expected to make an excellent match. And if there wasn't one here, at least she would learn how to conduct herself for the chase.”
― Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia