I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and -peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise.

— Aurora Levins Morales

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

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

I watched life and death unfold like a dance on the side of that road. My son was born with a bloodstained face and he died with blood from the accident covering that same face.

— Zeina Kassem

There wasn’t a question of what compromise there should be or what kind of peace process we should engage in. There was only one discussion: How do we remove the colonial power that is occupying ourcountry?

— Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

Israelis cannot be blamed for the conflicts and civilians casualties nor do the Palestinians. We can argue endlessly about it, the only one that can be blamed for this lasting battle is the Saudis fueling the conflicts for enduring their supremacy in the Arab world.

— M.F. Moonzajer

...It is only now that memory works both ways. Which of us dreamed it - those from the country of nights five times as warm and as cold, or those who turned away and woke?

— Angele Ellis

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

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

He walked out without his money.The lesson to me was clear: hold onto your integrity at all costs. Never compromise on that.

— Talal Abu-Ghazaleh