“She asks me to kill the spider, Instead, I get the most peaceful weapons I can find. I take a cup and a napkin. I catch the spider, put it outside and allow it to walk away. If I am ever caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, just being alive and not bothering anyone, I hope I am greeted with the same kind of mercy.

— Rudy Francisco, Helium

“though you're like an angel, nothing touches you. And I dare say nothing will touch you there. That's why I let you go, because I hope for that. You've got all your wits and about you. You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again. And I will wait for you. I feel that you're the only creature in the world who has not condemned me. My dear, I feel it, you know. I can't help feeling it.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Laila used to ask me not to stare at her while she slept. She believed that the honest expressions of her face were revealed when she lost control of them..and she did not want for me to discover her true feelings toward me, fearing I would become arrogant”

— Ghassan Kanafani 

“I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.”

— Khaled Hosseini

“Then she said, If someone killed you would you want to come back for revenge? No, I said, I’d rather come back to the people I loved. What if you came back to someone and they’d forgotten you? she said I’d tell them I loved them anyway, I said,”

— Marie Howe

“When the plane went down in San Francisco, I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes. He memorizes the wrecked metal details, the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke. Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes: The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa. It was almost a year before I learned his brother was a pilot. I can’t help it, I love the way men love.”

7 am in Cairo time, Egypt.

a 1996 Palestinian stamp depicting an olive branch