Did we have to fall from such heights, and to see our blood on our hands… to realize that we are no angels… as we used to believe?

And did we also have to reveal our flaws to the world so that our truth would be virgin no more?

How we lied when we said: We are the exception!

Believing yourself is worse than lying to others!

To be cordial with those who hate us and harsh with those who love us - this is the lowness of the arrogant and the arrogance of the low!
  
O past! Do not change us… whenever we stray away from you!
  
O future! Do not ask us: Who are you? 
And what do you want from me? We, too, do not know.
  
O present! Bear with us a little. We are but passersby - casting our gloom.

Identity is what we bequeath, not what we inherit. What we fashion, not what we remember. Identity is the distortion of the mirror that we must break whenever the image beguiles us!
  
He masked himself and picked up his courage and killed his mother… because she was the easiest of prey… and because a woman soldier stopped him, and bared her breasts saying: Does your mother have the same?
  
Were it not for shame and the dark, I would have visited Gaza, not knowing the way to the home of the new Abu Sufian* or the name of the new prophet!

Had Muhammad not been the last of the prophets, every gang would have a prophet and every disciple a militia!
  
We were pleased with June in its fortieth anniversary. If we do not find those who would crush us again, we defeat ourselves by ourselves, lest we forget!
  
However long you gaze into my eyes, you will find nothing there. A scandal has left me bereft me of my vision!
  
My heart is not mine… nor is it anyone else's. It has become independent of me, without turning into a stone.

Does he who intones Allahu Akbar over the body of his victim-brother know that he is a sinner since he sees God in his own image: smaller than a well-turned human?

The prisoner hid the smile of victory from the camera… he who dreams of inheriting the prison, but he could not curb the happiness gushing from his eyes.
  
Perhaps because the hurried script was mightier than the actor.
  
Why do we need narcissus, as long as we are Palestinians?
  
And as long as we do not know the difference between the mosque and the university because they have the same etymological root? For what do we need a state?... Since it and the days are hurtling towards one fate?
  
A large sign on the door of a nightclub: We welcome the Palestinians returning from the battle. Entry is free!  And our wine… does not intoxicate!
  
I cannot defend my right to work, a shoe-shiner on a sidewalk.
Because it is my customers' right to take me for a shoe thief - so told me a university professor!
  
"The stranger and I against my cousin. My cousin and I against my brother…and my sheik and I against myself." This is the first lesson of the new civic education… in the vaults of darkness.
 
Who enters Paradise first? He who died by the bullets of the enemy, or he who died by the bullets of the brother?
Some theologians say: "An enemy of yours perhaps of your mother was born"!
  
The fundamentalists do not bother me; they are believers in their special way. But they irk me, their secular supporters, and their atheist supporters who believe but in one religion: their pictures on TV!
  
He asked me: Does a hungry guard defend a home whose owner has gone to vacation on the French or the Italian Riviera… no difference?
I said: He does not!

And he asked me: Does I + I = two?
I said: You and you are less than one!
  
I am not ashamed of my identity because it is still in the making. But I am ashamed of some of what came in Ibn Khaldoun's Prolegomena.  

* Abu Sufian was the leader of Mecca when the Muslims took over. Meccans who entered his home were given sanctuary.