Near East Quotes

The pens sharpen – Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same – Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for women's bodies. ~ Polly Toynbee

Unlike many deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine husband or lover of any. ~ Elaine Pagels

I suppose it was a mistake to sketch in a background for the movie, in which I described a likely mix of people in a late-Roman settlement, amongst them people from Africa and the Near East. 'You mean they had black people back then!' was actually what my boss exclaimed when he read that. 'Could Lancelot's sidekick be black? ~ Michael Moorcock

In places like Germany or France the idea of black-white is not so much black-white but "our people and them," and "them" can be people from the near east like Turks or Muslims or North Africans, all of whom might well be considered white in the United States. ~ Nell Irvin Painter

Don't you have a class this morning, Georgie?"
Day mumbled something that sounded like
"Ancient History of the Near East and Greece."
"Poof!" scoffed Everhart, flourishing his fork,
"Come with me and see the Near East. ~ Jack Kerouac

We have nothing to destroy," said Rud. "All these things are done for already. They are falling in all over the world. They are dead. No need for destructive activities. But if we have nothing to destroy we have much to clear away. That's different. What is needed is a brand-new common-sense reorganisation of the world's affairs, and that's what we have to give them. I can't imagine how the government sleeps of nights. I should lie awake at night listening all the time for the trickle of plaster that comes before a smash. Ever since they began blundering in the Near East and Spain, they've never done a single wise thing. This American adventure spells disaster. Plainly. Australia has protested already. India now is plainly in collapse. Everyone who has been there lately with open eyes speaks of the vague miasma of hatred in the streets. We don't get half the news from India. Just because there exists no clear idea whatever of a new India, it doesn't mean that the old isn't disintegrating. Things that are tumbling down, tumble down. They don't
wait to be shown the plans of the new building. The East crumbles. All over the world it becomes unpleasant to be a foreigner, but an Englishman now can't walk in a bazaar without a policeman behind him... ~ H.G. Wells

The global importance of the Middle East is that it keeps the Far East and the Near East from encroaching on each other. ~ Dan Quayle

It is true that the role of Satan is not strongly emphasized in Scripture before the time of the Babylonian Exile, while polytheism is rampant in the ancient Near East. An emphasis upon Satan during this time would have been too easily misunderstood as a rival god to Yahweh. But this is not to say that the knowledge of Santan was nonexistent until postexilic times (Issues in Revelation and Inspiration, p. 117). ~ Richard M. Davidson

New political systems and philosophies were imported into the Near East under the general term democracy and grafted artificially into a society which was feudal in nature and theocratic in spirit. The results were not happy... ~ Gerald De Gaury

I am the Counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ~ Dennis Ross

The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hirther Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwannaland, Lhasas, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be . At any rate it out to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. (leter 53) ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

If Mother Culture were to give an account of human history using these terms, it would go something like this: ' The Leavers were chapter one of human history
a long and uneventful chapter. Their chapter of human history ended about ten thousand years ago with the birth of agriculture in the Near East. This event marked the beginning of chapter two, the chapter of the Takers. It's true there are still Leavers living in the world, but these are anachronisms, fossils
people living in the past, people who just don't realize that their chapter of human history is over. ' ~ Daniel Quinn

Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs. ~ Carroll Quigley

As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)

It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandon ~ Daniel Mendelsohn

Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity. ~ Karen Armstrong

this interpretation of certain Mesopotamian cultic functionaries has been vigorously criticized as a scholarly construct, overly reliant on nineteenth-century assumptions about "fertility cult" in the ancient Near East. While the vast textual evidence from cuneiform tablets reveals a bewilderingly large variety of female cultic personnel, some of whom are regularly mentioned alongside prostitutes or in contexts that hint of sexuality, they offer no clear-cut example of a "cultic prostitute," and it is likely that this conceptual category simply does not correspond to the more nuanced and complex roles of Mesopotamian women in relation to their goddesses.20 ~ Jennifer Larson

One early terracotta statuette from Catal Huyuk in Anatolia depicts an enthroned female in the act of giving birth, supported by two cat-like animals that form her seat (Plate 1). This figure has been identified as a 'birth goddess' and it is this type of early image that has led a number of feminist scholars to posit a 'reign of the goddess' in ancient Near Eastern prehistory. Maria Gimbutas, for whom such images are proof of a perfect matriarchal society in 'Old Europe' , presents an ideal vision in which a socially egalitarian matriarchal culture was overthrown by a destructive patriarchy (Gimbutas 1991). Gerda Lerner has argued for a similar situation in the ancient Near East; however, she does not discuss nude figurines at any length (Lerner 1986a: 147). More recently, critiques of the matriarchal model of prehistory have pointed out the flaws in this methodology (e.g. Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995; Goodison and Morris 1998). In all these critiques the identification of such figures as goddesses is rejected as a modern myth. There is no archaeological evidence that these ancient communities were in fact matriarchal, nor is there any evidence that female deities were worshipped exclusively. Male gods may have worshipped simultaneously with the 'mother goddesses' if such images are indeed representations of deities. Nor do such female figures glorify or show admiration for the female body; rather they essentialise it, reducing it to nothing more nor less than a re ~ Zainab Bahrani

Prehistory isn't like a 'veil' or a 'curtain' that 'lifts' to reveal the pre-set 'stage' of history. Rather, prehistory is an absence of something: an absence of writing. So a better image of the 'dawn of history' might be an AM radio in the pre-dawn hours: you recognize wisps of words or music across the dial, inter blending, and noise obscures even the few clear-channel stations. The first ones we find, when we switch on the radio of history about 3200B.C.E., come from Mesopotamia, and those from Egypt soon emerge. Eventually the neighbouring lands produce records, with the effect that the ancient Near East is probably the best documented civilization before the invention of printing." (Daniels and Bright, page 19) ~ Peter T. Daniels

[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village. ~ Daniel Quinn

The two revolutions, I mean the annual revolutions of the declination and of the centre of the Earth, are not completely equal; that is the return of the declination to its original value is slightly ahead of the period of the centre. Hence it necessarily follows that the equinoxes and solstices seem to anticipate their timing, not because the sphere of the fixed stars moves to the east, but rather the equatorial circle moves to the west, being at an angle to the plane of the ecliptic in proportion to the declination of the axis of the terrestrial globe. ~ Nicolaus Copernicus

The sizzle I felt being near him was so intense, but I couldn't figure out if they were fireworks or warning flares. ~ Donna Augustine

God is both transcendent (beyond us) and immanent (near us). ~ Dennis P. Hollinger

Any relationship, no matter how fulfilling and restorative it may be, can always be enlivened and enriched. Regardless of how elated or deflated you feel about your work, what can you do to breathe new life into it - to make it more rewarding than it has ever been? Do you need to leave your current work and answer another calling? What is your spiritual employment, dear reader, carrier of so many gifts? ~ Carolyn Baker

Biryukov continued, "Roman Talanov, my counterpart in the FSB, is leading this charge. I suppose with complete control over Russian intelligence activity abroad, he can expand his influence and begin destabilizing nations beyond the near abroad. Russia will invade Ukraine, probably within the next few weeks. They will annex the Crimea. From there, if they meet no resistance from the West, they will take more of the country, all the way to the Dnieper River. ~ Tom Clancy

The truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be. ~ Gregory David Roberts

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. ~ Willa Cather

In the East they say that luck favors the prepared mind. I believe that life favors the prepared mind. ~ Robin S. Sharma

I was east of Skepticism and north of Faith, with an unsettled compass and variable winds. But I could offer up a prayer as well as the next man, and leave it to Heaven to judge the result. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

Sometimes you just need a book near you and you can't explain why. ~ Deborah Wiles

When dawn spread its cool clear flush over the meadows and fields and thorny pastures to the north and east, Duane pulled an old lawn chair out of the cabin and sat down to watch, cradling a cup of coffee in his hands. It was chilly enough that he threw an old poncho over his lap. ~ Larry McMurtry

Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal. ~ Ayn Rand

I've lived near here at several different stretches across time, but once, when I lived here a few hundred years ago, I had a camel I named Oded. He was just about the laziest creature ever to talk the Earth. He would pass out when I was in the middle of feeding him, and making it to the closest Bedouin camp for tea was a minor miracle. But when I first met you in that lifetime-"
"Oded broke into a run," Luce said without thinking. "I screamed because I thought he was going to trample me. You said you'd never seen him move like that."
"Yeah, well," Daniel said. "He liked you."
They paused and looked at each other, and Daniel started laughing when Luce's jaw dropped. "I did it!" she cried out. "It was just there, in my memory, a part of me. Like it happened yesterday. I came to me without thinking!"
It was miraculous. All those memories from all those lives that had been lost each time Lucinda died in Daniel's arms were somehow finding their way back to her, the way Luce always found her way back to Daniel.
No. She was finding her way to them.
It was like a gate had been left open after Luce's quest through the Announcers. Those memories stayed with her, from Moscow to Helston to Egypt. Now more were becoming available.
She had a sudden, keen sense of who she was-and she wasn't just Luce Price from Thunderbolt, Georgia. She was every girl she'd ever been, an amalgamation of experience, mistakes, achievements, and, above all, love.
She wa ~ Lauren Kate

Big fucking mistake man. You can't be near her. Don't you get it? [ ... ] She's part of this city. Do you see? I mean, really part of it. You hurt her, you - hurt all of this. ~ Christopher Fowler

They all stood unwilling on the sandbar, holding to the net. In the eastern sky were the familiar castles and the round towers to which they were used, gray, pink, and blue, growing darker and filling with thunder. Lightning flickered in the sun along their thick walls. But in the west the sun shone with such a violence that in an illumination like a long-prolonged glare of lightning the heavens looked black and white; all color left the world, the goldenness of everything was like a memory, and only heat, a kind of glamor and oppression, lay on their heads. The thick heavy trees on the other side of the river were brushed with mile-long streaks of silver, and a wind touched each man on the forehead. At the same time there was a long roll of thunder that began behind them, came up and down mountains and valleys of air, passed over their heads, and left them listening still. With a small, near noise a mockingbird followed it, the little white bars of its body flashing over the willow trees.

'We are here for a storm now,' Virgil said. 'We will have to stay till it's over.'

("The Wide Net") ~ Eudora Welty

I try whistling to fill in the silence. The soprano sax from Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," though of course my dubious whistling doesn't come anywhere near the complex, lightning-quick original. I just add bits so what I hear in my head approximates the sound. Better than nothing, I figure. ~ Haruki Murakami

You've never seen Manhattan 'til you've flown right up the East River. It's beautiful. ~ Cory Lidle

What a delightful place Bath is," said Mrs. Allen as they sat down near the great clock, after parading the room till they were tired; "and how pleasant it would be if we had any acquaintance here. ~ Jane Austen

The description of Huck's father grabbed my full attention, and I glanced up at the book in my teacher's hand as if to double check. My eyes bulged reflexively. Huck's father was an abusive drunk just like mine. The boy was hopeful that a corpse found near the river was actually his dad, but it turned out not to be. It was spooky how high my hopes rose for the boy, and then sank so utterly low when the body was discovered to be a female in disguise. I should've mourned for the woman, but it was the boy I felt bad for. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Then you're no doubt well aware that a scrapper from East India would never be permitted to work as a barrister in any circle of significance." Tucking his bowler hat beneath his arm, Arjun stored the coriander cutting inside the breast pocket of his grey frock coat. "That's by design, in case you didn't know." He laughed to himself. "Not all of us believe in such notions," Pippa said softly. "That may be true," he said, "but all of you definitely benefit from it." Pippa paled as she struggled to respond. ~ Renee Ahdieh

Morane gestured them to some seats near the front, but close to the archway. Probably Nicholas's preference, in case someone threw a bomb. Or in case he decided to throw one. ~ Martha Wells

15. "Few men during their lifetime comes anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used."
~ Richard Evelyn Byrd

Look at the most religious areas of the world at present - the Middle East and the United States. These are sick societies, and they're going to get sicker. People are never more dangerous than when they have nothing left to believe in except God. ~ J.G. Ballard

Actual evil probably requires much more creativity, passion, and political ideology than anyone at or near the top of Microsoft seems to possess. ~ Jon Katz

Hoooray!! That meant everyone survived the round! The announcement was received with a very loud cheer from all the players. Each of us received bonus experience and coins for that achievement. During the intermission, some Roblox players ran to the shop to purchase goods. One guy bought a slime gun, with which he immediately used on the other Roblox players near him. It wouldn't cause any damage but cover them ~ Nooby Lee

Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list. ~ John Berger

For the past three months, the walls of Goodspeed forced us close together. Now I´m wondering if they were the only things that kept Amy near me. ~ Beth Revis

I think Chicago people are very special people, and the Midwest's confluence of East Coast-meets-Midwest sensibilities had to, on a formative level, inform me as an artist and an actor. In that sense, it had to have helped me. ~ Daniel Sunjata

I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began. ~ William Hazlitt

Bashar Assad has said many things. We will see in the near term whether he is serious about a political process. ~ Adel Al-Jubeir

The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed. ~ Albert Einstein

The whole issue was almost unbelievably meaningless and small. He thought about the word "meaning" and tried to summon up his baby's face without looking at the photo, but all he could get was the heft of a full diaper and the plastic mobile over his crib turning in the breeze that the box fan in the doorway made. He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow, unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn't already been a million times before, and imagining the second hand was so awful it made his breath catch in his throat, and he looked quickly around to see if any of the examiners near him had heard it or were looking at him. ~ David Foster Wallace

None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine. If we have to see God in the black face of an old woman, it's bound to remind us that there's a devil for every god - and our devil may be closer than we like to think. ~ Stephen King

The other boys at Yale came from wealthy families, and none of them were investing outside the United States, and I thought, 'That is very egotistical. Why be so shortsighted or near-sighted as to focus only on America? Shouldn't you be more open-minded?' ~ John Templeton

Nix to Declan:

Begin transcript -
Testing. Hello, hellooo, anybody out there? Check, check, one, two. Soft pee. Puh, puh. Resonance! Sooooooft pee. Alpha bravo disco tango duck.
This is Nïx! I'm the Ever-Knowing One, a goddess incandescent, incomparable, and irresistible. But enough about what you think of me. It's a beautiful day in New Orleans. The wind is out of the east at a steady five knots and clouds look like rabbits … But enough about what you think of me!
Now, down to business -
Squirrel!
Where was I? [Long pause] Why am I in Regin's car? Bertil, you crawl right back out of that bong this minute!
Oh, I remember! I am hereby laying down this track for Magister Declan Chase. If you are a mortal of the recorder peon class, know that Dekko and I go waaaaay back, and he'll go berserk (snicker snicker) if he doesn't receive this transmittal. …
Chase, riddle me this: what's beautiful but monstrous, long of tooth but sharp of tooth and soft of mind, and can never ever tell a lie?
That's right. The Enemy of Old can be very useful to you. So use him already.
P.S. Your middle name's about to be spelled r-e-g-r-e-t.
And with that, I must bid you adieu. Don't worry, we'll catch up very soon. …
[Muffled] Who's mummy's wittle echolocator? That's right - you are!
- End transcript ~ Kresley Cole

My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals. ~ Deborah Moggach

A series of interlocking islands and bridges, with wide white-sand beaches on the green Gulf of Mexico and placid marinas on Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg was a place of stucco and sunshine, East Coast attitude and tropical rain, cheap gas and imported food. ~ Adam Skolnick

If two pilgrims, which have wandered some few miles together, have a heart's grief when they are near to part, what must the sorrow be at the parting of two so loving friends and never-loathing lovers as the body and the soul? ~ William Drummond

A low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men. ~ Eric Hoffer

She stands on the cliffs, near the old crumbling stone house. There's nothing left in the house but an upturned table, a ladle, and a clay bowl. She stands for more than an hour, goose-bumped and shivering. At these times, she won't confide in me. She runs her hands over her body, as if checking that it's still there, her heart pulsing and beating. The limbs are smooth and strong, thin and sinewy, her hair long and black and messy and gleaming despite her age. You wouldn't know it to look at her, that she's lived long enough to look for what's across the water. Eighty years later, and she is still fifteen. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

The world seems to be witnessing a deluge of 'haterisms', and racist propaganda because evil's pain was born to die, and it's time of tyranny is near the end. Don't get caught up by the souls of wickedness; this ain't your fight. ~T.F. Hodge ~ T.F. Hodge

Women in America will have to find an answer for the pressures of work and family, but if you really care about women's issues you have to think about women in the world, especially Africa, Asia and the Middle East. ~ Gail Collins

It is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine traits.He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a cripple. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A globalized world is by now a familiar fact of life. Building walls or moats may sound appealing, but the future belongs to those who tend to their people and then boldly engage the rest of the world, near and far. ~ Jon Meacham