Osama Quotes

“Books, he thought, were a sort of migratory bird. Here they rested a while, weary of their travels, before taking flight again, before moving, settling in another nest for a time. They seemed to him like a flock that had descended on these tables, pages fluttering like wings, and here they rested in the shade, enjoying the lull, knowing it would soon be time to go on their way again.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“The English, he thought, had once conquered most of the known world, but their cooking hadn't improved as a result.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“What if the Cairo Conference of 1921 went ahead as planned, with Churchill and T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell dividing up the Middle East for the British? What if they chose a Hashemite king to rule Iraq, and would that have led to a revolution in the nineteen fifties? Or, what if the French war in Indochina somehow led to American involvement in Vietnam? Or if the British held on to their colonies in Africa after the Second World War? You see – " he was in full steam now, his eyes shining like the headlamps of a speeding engine – "the Vigilante series is full of this sort of thing. A series of simple decisions made in hotel rooms and offices that led to a completely different world.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“... but is it crime or an act of war?" Depends on who's telling the story ...”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“Do you know what a journalist is? Someone who hasn't written a novel yet.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“Life isn't a pulp novel, Joe, and death isn't either.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“The fat man looked amused. "What on earth for?" he said. "I never have any contact with writers. If I do, they just keep pestering me about getting paid.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe's world.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“Let go of Osama Bin Laden, let go of books where bombs go off and people die, let go of this war you have no scale for, that you don't understand.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“It was a war about fear, he thought, not figures on the ground. It was a war of narrative, a story of a war, and it grew in the telling.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“Listen to this. A bomb goes off downtown and the police arrest the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and Osama Bin Laden. They put them in an identity parade and have a witness try to point out the perpetrator. Who does she pick?"
Joe said, "I don’t know."
"Osama Bin Laden," the taxi driver said. "Because the other three don’t exist.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“Conspiracies and Crime, Murder and Mayhem, Vengeance and Valor –
For the First. Time. Ever!
Only In New York City –
A Global Gathering of Like Minded Minds:
OsamaCon !!!
Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden??
The shadowy Vigilante, the arch-criminal mastermind, the enemy of Western Civilization?
Come and find out – if you dare!
Be blown away – only at the First Annual OsamaCon, coming soon”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“Joe looked out of the window again. He had the feeling that outside the window there should have been hover-cars, men in trilby hats and jet packs, spider-webs of passageways spreading out of the distant tops of the towers. There should have been women in silver suits taking in a show at the tri-vids before indulging in a spot of lunch, the kind that came in three-course pills, great big subservient robots trailing behind them. Instead there was a brown man in overalls collecting rubbish with a long stick outside an adult cinema, and the cars were halted, bumper-to-bumper, beside a traffic light that seemed to be stuck permanently on red. There was a siren in the distance. There was the sound of car horns, a door slamming, someone cursing loudly in American English.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“And also they’re just good escapist fun," Vivian said firmly, and Gill subsided beside her, giving an apologetic smile. "To read about these horrible things and know they never happened, and when you’re finished you can put down the book and take a deep breath and get on with your life. To know it’s fiction – "
"Pulp fiction," Gill said ...”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“It's a small publication dedicated to a scholarly discourse of the Osamaverse.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama

“Joe wished it had all been just a dream. To think of planes crashing into impossibly-tall towers, of bombs taking out eyes and teeth and fingers, of a silent, secret war he didn’t understand, was to think of fiction, a cheap paperback thriller with a lurid cover. There was – there could be – nothing real about such things.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Osama