Egypt.mother of civilization, dreaming herself through the centuries. Dreaming us all, her children: those who stay and work for her and complain of her, and those who leave and yearn for her and blame her with bitterness for driving them away.

From 1949 to the present, for every dollar the US spent on an African, it spent $250.65 on an Israeli, and for every dollar it spent on someone from the Western Hemisphere outside the US, it spent $214 on an Israeli.

I now find myself looking at every sentence, every image, that purports to tell the West about the Arabs and the Muslims with this question in mind: to what extent does it feed into existing stereotypes and established prejudice?

If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too?

I haven't come to you only to take , I haven't come to you empty handed : I bring you poetry as great as yours but in anther tongue , I bring you black eyes and golden skin and curly hair , I bring you Islam and Luxor and Alexandria and Lutes and tambourines and date-palms and silk rugs and sunshine and incense and voluptuous ways

And Egypt ? What is Egypt strenght?her resilience ?her ability to absorb poeple and events into the pores of her being? is that true or is it just a consolation ? a shifting of responsibility? and if it is true , how much can she absorb and still remain Egypt ?

But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you are running -panting- to catch up.

She had been wrong to think it wouldn't matter that much to him, yes,He took her for granted, of course he did , but he took her for granted - not like an old coat in the corner of a dark cupboard, as she'd put it to herself , but like the very air that he breathed .

Sometimes,because we use the same words,we assume we mean the same thing

So at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow the closer you are to the heart, the closer to the reversal. Nowhere to go but down. You reach the core and then you're blown away--

Tell me, if you thought a man had a tendresse for you, but he wasn't doing anything about it. And you wanted to hurry him up a little so you made a move, an unmistakable move one that nobody could pretend had been a misunderstanding. And he - he ignored it - ignored you. What would you feel?

You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not to be beaten up or killed to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--