This blog entry is a long list of awesome quotes from a book I just finished and that I have to write a paper on. So as a part of the process, I've typed out an over-abundance of quotes to pick from as I write my paper. The book is Sitt Marie Rose, by Etel Adnan and I would be more than happy to lend it to you. If you like, feel free to float your mind around some of them. =-) feel free to voice your insights, dialogues are wonderful!
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"the middle east lives its destiny. no sound seems trivial or ordinary. the power of terror is totalitarian. bullets crack and resonate in the amphitheatre that is Beirut."

"Thunder mixes with the rhythmic sounds of war which purge Beirut. It ceases to be a city of merchants and becomes masses of killers let loose on a cosmic background."

"During these days human reason appears like an insulating body, an impotent power. The city is an electro-magnetic field into which everyone wants to plug himself. It is no longer a place of habitation, but a being which resembles a runaway train."

"Violence is absorbed like a consumer product. I understood this need for violence one day in front of an electric wire torn from its socket. In the two holes there remained two little bits of brilliant copper wire which seemed to call out to me. And I wanted to touch them, to reunite them in my hand, to make that current pass through my body, and see what it was like to burn. I resisted only with an extraordinary effort."

"Everyone feels a prison closing in, and keeps making a lot of phone calls. Space shrinks. All day we listen to foreign radion stations to know what's going on. Here there is neither government nor news."

"The city is more deserted than if there were a curfew. You can no longer see the snipers. Bullets seem to leave by themselves."

"Minutes seem to have fewer than sixty seconds. They go faster. The mechanism of time is out of order."

"The hastily established military government announces the "news". What they broadcast, however, aren't war reports, but reports of sadism."

"We've only lost a hundred and fifty. That's all. The rest were civilians- so many lost bullets."

"I tell myself that it would be better to let loose a million birds in the sky over Lebanon, so that these hunters could practice on them, and this carnage could be avoided."

"For me, time is dead."

"In the street younger and younger militia men make their appearance. They employ children for their suppleness. They crawl under the line of fire and gather up abandoned arms in the adversary camp. They also learn to love the Party and how to die."

"You would have to seek out someone squatting in a corner, someone not yet fanaticized by the tornado in order to touch some semblance of humanity, which, like a compass, still marks the magnetic North of the human species."

"This city is like a great suffering being, too mad, too overcharged, broken now, gutted, and raped like those girls raped by thirty or forty militia men, and are now mad and in the asylums because their families, Mediterranean to the end, would rather hide than cure... but how does one cure the memory?"

"She looks unhappy. But there's a truce. They told us. She doesnt like the war. Neither do we, because we can't take part in it."

"my name is Tony and it will never be Mohammed."

"They love destruction because it's the process of peeling away. It makes them believe they are on the road to truth"

"Thats why the war doesnt stop. Nobody wants it to stop"

"I have trouble convincing my children that all this is obscene. They think of one thing only: growing up and fighting."

"The Crusade which I always thought was impossible has, in fact, taken place. But it's not really religious. It's part of a larger Crusade directed against the poor. They bomb the underprivleged quarters because they consider the poor to be vermin they think will eat them. They fight to block the tide of those who have lost everything, or those who never had anything, and have nothing to lose."

"Morality is violence. An invisible violence at first. Love is a supreme violence, hidden deep in the darkness of our atoms. When a man and a woman find each other in the silence of the night, it's the beginning of the end of the tribe's power, and death itself becomes a challenge to the ascendancy of the group."

"Sheperd or sheep you always have defined yourselves in terms of herds."

"It's a waste of time to try to reform a woman who takes herself seriously"

"The churches of the arab east still define themselves in opposition to an imaginary paganism. They 're not in actual communication with any force other than the Dragon. The sword of Saint George is what inspires their actions."

"They are moved by a sick sexuality, a mad love, where images of crushing and cries dominate. It's not that they are deprived of women or men if they like, but rather are inhibited by a profound distaste for the sexual thing. A sense of the uncleanliness of pleasure torments them and keeps them from every being satisfied. Thus, the arabs let themselves go in a tearing, killing, annihilating violence, and seek a primitive and absolute genocide. In their fights they dont try to conquer lands, but to eliminate each other. And if after death they persist in mutilating the corpse, it's to diminish the enemy's body still more, and erase if possible the fact that he ever existed, the existence of the enemy being a kind of sacrilege which exacts a purification equally as monstrous"

"She breaks on the territory of their imaginations like a tidal wave. Feminine symbols tear at them with their claws. For seven thousand years the goddess isis has given birth without there being a father."

"each passing person, she said, is full of his own term of time. Everyone lives Time. if then one added every second lived by each of these people, lived by each of us, by all the people of the world, at this precise moment, it would make all the eternity of Time."


"She saw him again at the funeral...He walked tranquilly before, in the group of the militants of the Resistance, their eyes red, their lips tired, their hands open. She saw how haggard these people were, and understood the nature of their new wandering. These were no longer nomads comforted by their tribe and their herd, but a people perpetually pursued, as if by some cosmic agreement."

"they breathed air laced with betrayal."

"During the night he never once said 'You are my wife', or 'You are the mother of my children'. He didnt need to mentally project a pornographic film seen on a trip to Denmark, in order to possess her with pleasure. He simply wantd to be completely with her, and she with him."

"He took the time out to cry. He discarded all that he knew. He forgot his name and his age. He was reduced to nothing but the consciousness of his own pain. He felt powerless to help her and strangely humiliated."

"Everyone knew how horrible this war was, but this woman's capture brought to light a feeling of revolt against the injustice of the war which up until then had been held clenched inside."

"Like the presence of this woman, taken at random at a roadblock, who should, according to the norms, be a part of his clan, his flesh and blood. He wanted to construct a country where this sort of problem could not exist. But the problem came before the ideal country Mounir wanted to build. He would have to fight the dissident Christians to save the real Christians. His head spun."

"No one is interested in anything but his own destiny. It's always the destiny of others that must be conquered and destroyed."

"In a society where the only freedom of choice, when there is any, is between the different brands of automobiles, can any notion of Justice exist, and can genocide not become an inescapable consequence?

"The cell that contains the desire for liberty is killed, digested, reabsorbed."

"The abyss that lies between the horizontals of sleep and death is the most difficult to cross. I learned by heart something that's never taught."

"Death is never in the plural. Let's not exaggerate its victory. It's total enough. Let's not sing about that victory. There are not millions of deaths. It happens millions of times that someone dies."

"where are all the curses for which our race is famous? I havent the strength for imprecations, nor the desire to imagine new misfortunes. God, whoever you are, protect the future generations from the genocide that awaits them."

"As long as I live, they'll die. I swear it on the cross I wear"

"I know that the only true love is the love of the Stranger."

"what gives you the right to pretend you can save souls? When you sow hate, you sow evil without redemtion. No! You have also perverted Christ. NO! You emasculated the students in your schools and universities, making them submit to your will, humiliating them hour after hour until finally, in order to reaffirm themselves they found murder was their only recourse."

"In this centry no one has fought with holy metals on as many chests, the Virgin on as many rifles, the crucifix on as many tanks, the name of God on so many lips, the vision of Heaven before so many eyes, as our young men."

"Yes you've made them insensible to pain by glorifying thorns and nails, glorifying blood as a beverage and human flesh as nourishment. They exalt themselves with flagellation, and passed their childhoods hearing terrifying stories of Hell. In your schools that smell of incense and sweat they identified with Christ and the executioner, taking themselves first for the one and then for the other." They kill and mutilate with a rosary in their hands, believing that they serve the Virgin. And you want me to bow before such a fantasy?"

"You taught them that the ideal family consists of a Christ without a father, and a mother who like the Arab woman loves no one but her son."

"They leave nothing on the ground but a pile of dislocated members that was a sinner. I can give her neither extreme unction nor benediction. She no longer has a face."

"When I am right I know it. Then I take off, believing that Im really free of the cage. But to discover a truth is to discover a fundamental limit, a kind of inner wall to the mind, so i fall again to the ground of passing time."

"Fear of torture often crossed her mind. She had told her friends that if she refused to join certain clandestine political parties it was because of her fear of prison. But she supported the Resistance with a profound conviction, because it seemed more a question of love than politics."

"Torture preoccupied her because she saw in it, or rather in the person who could resist it, the summit of human courage. She hated physical suffering, abhorred it, and considered it a fundamental injustice to Nature."

"In the classroom, held in their bewildering simplicity, is the group of justices, Mounir, Tony, Fouad, and Bouna Lias. Before them, Marie-Rose, beneath the extinguished electric light bulg hung by a chord, and the deaf-mutes. On the wall there is a crucifix. But, in this room, Christ is a tribal prince. He leads to nothing but ruin. One is never right to invoke him in such circumstances, because the true Christ only exists when one stands up to one's own brothers to defend the Stranger. Only then does Christ embody innocence."


Thats all folks. Im very interested in anything you might have to say, if even just one strikes you.