Beirut Quotes

“The local dealers were cutting their coke with crystal meth”
― Edward Williams, Framed & Hunted: A True Story of Occult Persecution

“When I arrived in Beirut from Europe, I felt the oppressive, damp heat, saw the unkempt palm trees and smelt the Arabic coffee, the fruit stalls and the over-spiced meat. It was the beginning of the Orient. And when I flew back to Beirut from Iran, I could pick up the British papers, ask for a gin and tonic at any bar, choose a French, Italian, or German restaurant for dinner. It was the beginning of the West. All things to all people, the Lebanese rarely questioned their own identity.”
― Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon

“Magic is hard on our world. Pulling it in is really violent and damaging. The more we use it, the more we stretch out the membrane between this world and the one we draw it in from. And the other side…' She looked at Maldonado and he nodded. 'Well, it’s toxic.”
― Edward Williams

“The beauty of the sea is that it never shows any weakness and never tires of the countless souls that unleash their broken voices into its secret depths.”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“Before I started killing people, I like to think I was a fairly normal kid.”
― Edward Williams

“Nothing is very constant in Beirut. Certainly not dreams. But despair isn’t constant either. Beirut is a city to be loved and hated a thousand times a day. Every day. It is exhausting, but it is also beautiful.”
― Nasri Atallah

“I will follow anyone
And ask everyone
To stand together as one nation
Against the killing of innocent citizens”
― Widad Akrawi

“I feel like my life is made up of tiny puzzle parts that no longer fit together. Imagine working on a puzzle only to find that the final picture can never be complete because one of its pieces is missing. This is exactly what's happened to my life; it has become impossible to put it back together.”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“I am from Lebanon, from Beirut and Saida

I am from the ground underneath my home

I am from the trees, the cedar tree

I come from Tabouleh and brown eyes, from Karim...

Kassar and Kassem

I come from happiness and culture

From "Habibi" and "Hayete"

I am from all religions

I am from the room beneath the stars.”
― Zeina Kassem, Talal Kassem

“It's as though you had lost an arm or leg but still instinctively reach out to feel your missing limb or try to walk again, placing your entire weight on something that no longer is there.”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“Grief is shameless; it refuses to be ignored. If you let it have its way, it becomes fatal. If you try to remove it piece by piece, it only multiplies like a tumor. And if you try to fight it, it becomes like quicksand; you try to claw your way back to the surface, and for a second you feel the fresh air against your face, thinking you've survived, only to be pulled fiercely back down again, swallowed whole, nothing left.”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“Day after day, the globalization of terrorism becomes more evident. This is the one of the biggest challenges we are facing. We must stand with the innocent people around the world who are suffering or have lost their loved ones as a result of terrorism.”
― Widad Akrawi

“I wish I had lost an arm or a leg. It would have been much easier than losing a part of my heart, which lives on, but now beats to a different rhythm.”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“Our dead become the photographs and words we hang on the walls, but they also hang on the walls of our hearts, the windows of our lips, and the sobs in our voices.”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introduced to that day with Ali and Kamal was the Beirut of its people. You take different groups, put them on top of each other, simmer for a thousand years, keep adding more and more strange tribes, simmer for another few thousand years, salt and pepper with religion, and what you get is a delightful mess of a stew that still tastes delectable and exotic, no matter how many times you partake of it.”
― Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati

“In Beirut, death’s unremitting light shines bright for all to see, brighter than the Mediterranean sun, brighter than the night’s Russian missiles, brighter than a baby’s smile.”
― Rabih Alameddine, I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters

“بيروت مدينة مليئة بصخب الحياة. والموت.”
― Fatima Sharafeddine, فاتن

“I don't think I ever fully understood before now the old saying that goes: "A mother's heart loves her young one until he grows; her ill one until he heals; and her traveler until he returns."

I have experienced all kinds of waiting; I've waited for my young to grow and the sick to heal, but I am still waiting on my little traveler and I do not know how long it will be until I see him again.”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“و بيروت إذا أردت أن تقدم تعريفا مناسبا لهافلن تجد مهما أجهدت ذهنك شيئا تقوله سوى أنها .. بيروت”
― محمد عفيفي, ضحكات صارخة

“That's when it hit me; my sunglasses were buried in the grave where my Talal lay.

Yes, my sunglasses were buried with him. But oh, how I wish my eyes had gone with him instead.”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“Arab' is the new four-letter word, didn't you know?”
― Anissa Rafeh, Beirut to the 'burbs

“For decades, Lebanon had lured not just revolutionaries but also poets, ideologues, artists, and all types of opposition figures and plotters. A weak state was both a blessing and a curse. In Beirut, there was no dictatorship to muzzle opinions—or your guns. The war had made the small Mediterranean country even more of a haven, a live training ground with a casino and restaurants that still served smoked salmon and caviar during cease-fires. There were breadlines and economic hardship, massacres and literary conferences. Every spy agency was in town: the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who discovers her husband is cheating on her with one of her grad students, and who, while feigning ignorance of the affair, drives the girl mad with increasingly brutal critiques and research tasks, at one point banishing her to Beirut, first to learn fluent Arabic and then to read Avicenna's Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, housed in the American University. This was, Amy thought, a showoffy detail that hinted at Marzen's impressive erudition but was probably arrived at within five Googling minutes.”
― Jincy Willett, Amy Falls Down

“لطالما وددتُ أن أشتري جميع البالونات وأطلق سراحها، غير أنّي كنتُ أجزم كلّ مرّة بأنّ مالك الحوراني، وهو لقبه، أمين عليها أكثر من الجميع. لا يسلّمها إلّا للأطفال، الذين يقدّرون معنى الأشياء قبل أن يحرّروها، فتصير كالمشرّدين، صاحبة حرّيّة مغمّسة بالكآبة.”
― أحمد محسن, وارسو قبل قليل

“From cradle to grave, Talal sprinted through life.

I never did see a life extinguished so abruptly.”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“Do our dreams carry messages from the great beyond, sent by the people we have lost, or are they a reflection of our desperation and wishful thinking?”
― Zeina Kassem, Crossing

“It's not that you were memorable,
but you had the quality of eternal details,
like faded graffiti, abandoned newspapers,

or a few smudged notes,
almost an offbeat line,
scribbled as if by mistake
amid the frenzy of Bliss Street.”
― Zeina Hashem Beck, To Live in Autumn

“To the people of Beirut, the post-apocalyptic world of The Umbrella Academy is now a reality. They now live in an obliterated world. From this day forward, they exist in a destroyed world. For them, the End Times just happened.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America

“It's as though you had lost an arm or leg but still instinctively reach out to feel your missing limb or try to walk again, placing your entire weight on something that is no longer is there.”
― Zeina Kassem

“If Beirut was the supermarket of the left in the 1970s, where Marxists, communists, Egyptians, Iraqis, and all the Palestinian factions debated and theorized, published and drank in bars arguing over ideas and the fought in the streets, Peshawar was the supermarket of the Islamists in the 1980s without drinking: there the discussions were about Islamic law, fatwas, the war of the believers, the unity of the Muslim nation, and the humanitarian needs of Afghan refugees.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East