Quotes from Anthony Shadid

I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story.

On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I've spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent.

In any kind of conflict, you have a certain dehumanization that comes along with it. And it's important as a reporter, a writer, a journalist, to try to restore humanity.

I think Syria is often covered by phone. You have to talk to activists. You have to try to read the tea leaves. You have to talk to government officials. It's remote-control reporting in a way.

The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.

I wondered whether he was trying to return to a place that no longer existed. Isn't that always the case when we try to go home again?

Arabic also has a far greater facility to communicate sarcasm, and it can be employed precisely, or with pitch-perfect irony.

After life is bent, torn, exploded, there are shattered pieces that do not heal for years, if at all. What is left are scars and something else—shame, I suppose, shame for letting it all continue.

Sometimes it is better to imagine the past than to remember it.

He was a man caught between two places, one where he would always be a stranger, one where he was no longer a native. Time and change had made him a perpetual traveler, never comfortable again, like many who had lost their homes or those who had traveled across the world, always searching for them.

Like my grandmother, I understood questions of identity, how being torn in two often leaves something less than one.

I should be in Beirut, I thought, working as a journalist, but another part of me was so wary of that old life of guns and misery. I did not want to see Tyre again, or Qana, or Baghdad. I wanted to do nothing more than move dirt from one place to another.

What befalls a trained soldier during combat between nations is one thing; what occurs at home—on our street, in our yard, and on our land, to family—is not the same. In Qana, those who died would not flee, would not leave their homes. That is what bayt means.

For so long, Lebanon had wrestled with the rudimentary questions of identity: whether its inhabitants were Arabs first or Lebanese above all, whether they belonged to East or West, whether they were bound to a destiny that stretched far beyond its borders—the Muslim world, for instance—or were part of a legacy as particular as the history of ancient Phoenicia.

I was raised with an innocence at odds with the experience of my pragmatic Arab ancestors. To be born in these parts is not only to know loss and rumination, but also to savor the endless pleasures of discord.

longer familiar to anyone, not in this new place. Gone are those who understand how you became yourself. Gone are the reasons lurking in the past that might excuse your mistakes. Gone is everything beyond your name on the day of your arrival, and even that may ultimately be surrendered.

Your first discovery when you travel," wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, "is that you do not exist." In other words, it is not just the others who have been left behind; it is all of you that is known. Gone is the power or punishment of your family name, the hard-earned reputations of forebears, no

the sight of militiamen sipping coffee at Starbucks, their rocket-propelled grenades resting in chairs in a distinctly Lebanese vision of globalization.

We have lost the splendors our ancestors created, and we go elsewhere. People are reminded of that every day here, where an older world, still visible on every corner, fails to hide its superior ways.

In the Middle East, the first lesson is the meaning of silence. The state of the spirit, it is believed, reveals itself in small tasks, rituals, all the things that war interrupts. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace, they lull the world to calm. Sometimes it is better to imagine the past than to remember it.

hospitality, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance.

The Middle East that had fascinated, preoccupied, and saddened me for decades was gone.

Dictatorship, in its own twisted way, was understandable; repression was universal. War is so random, so arbitrary.

Artificial and forced, instruments themselves of repression, the borders were their obstacle, having wiped away what was best about the Arab world. They hewed to no certain logic; a glimpse at any map suggests as much. The lines are too straight