#east

I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as 'Abu Nidal' ('father of struggle'), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat's main enemies. The meeting began inauspiciously when Abu Nidal asked me if I would like to be trained in one of his camps. No thanks, I explained. From this awkward beginning there was a further decline. I was then asked if I knew Said Hammami, the envoy of the PLO in London. I did in fact know him. He was a brave and decent man, who in a series of articles in the London Times had floated the first-ever trial balloon for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. 'Well tell him he is a traitor,' barked my host. 'And tell him we have only one way with those who betray us.' The rest of the interview passed as so many Middle Eastern interviews do: too many small cups of coffee served with too much fuss; too many unemployed heavies standing about with nothing to do and nobody to do it with; too much ugly furniture, too many too-bright electric lights; and much too much faux bonhomie. The only political fact I could winnow, from Abu Nidal's vainglorious claims to control X number of 'fighters' in Y number of countries, was that he admired the People's Republic of China for not recognizing the State of Israel. I forget how I got out of his office. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#arafat #china #interviews #iraq #israel

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die? ↗

— Frederick Buechner

#dimness #easter #fragrance #photograph #song

Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels. ↗

— Jeannette Walls

#beasts #mankind #perfection #mankind

Jon:'What are you doing up there? Why aren't you at the feast?' Tyrion: 'Too hot, too noisy, and I'd drunk too much wine', the dwarf told him. 'I learned long ago that it is considered rude to vomit on your brother. ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#alcohol #drunk #dwarf #feast #jon-snow

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance. ↗

— Samuel Butler

#belief #body #follows #least #like

A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart. ↗

— Hal Borland

#awesome #color #dancing #fire #flame

But unlike European countries, America has never finished a map of the United States, only the eastern United States is covered and a few spots here and there. ↗

— William Labov

#countries #covered #eastern #european #european countries

If there are going to be people out there making war on other people, don't you think it's a good idea for some of those people to at least follow a code of ethics? Not 'honor' but something you can pin down and be sure of, something with the same rules for everybody. ↗

— Mercedes Lackey

#down #ethics #everybody #follow #going

I had only that one picture, Hitler, the Beast of Berlin, in which I had a part big enough to impress anyone. I tried for better roles over and over again. ↗

— Alan Ladd

#anyone #beast #berlin #better #big

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression. ↗

— Arthur Laffer

#coast #depression #east #east coast #everyone