Quotes About Lebanese

Not all of us were lucky enough to be born into a huge Lebanese family, where visiting relatives and being stuffed with copious amounts of pickles, hummus, felafel and kibbeh is not just a way of life but a birth right.

A hakawati is a teller of tales, myths, and fables. A storyteller, and entertainer. A troubadour of sorts, someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarns. Like the word "hekayah" story, fable, news, hakawati is derived from the Lebanese word "haki", which means talk or conversation. This suggests that in Lebanese the mere act of talking is storytelling.

You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.

Like most Lebanese, Joumana speaks rapidly, one sentence dovetailing into another, producing guttural words and phrases as if gargling with mouthwash. I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversations with many pauses, pauses replacing words.

The Syrians are trying to say that the Lebanese are not capable of ruling themselves.

When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.

As an inspiration for terrorism, however, nationalism has been far more productive than religion. Terrorism experts agree that the denial of a people's right to national self-determination and the occupation of its homeland by foreign forces has historically been the most powerful recruiting agent of terrorist organizations, whether their ideology is religious (the Lebanese Shii) or secular (the PLO).

In years gone by, when Israel's military pride was at its height, the standard jocular boast about Lebanon had been that, if ever it needed to conquer it, its army band would suffice. Now, upon returning from their service there, its soldiers threw themselves to the ground and kissed Israeli soil in gratitude for their survival, or, in the despised Lebanese and Palestinian manner, expressed their immense relief in celebratory salvos of automatic fire.87

There's this Lebanese lady I dearly loved who raised 13 children in Toledo, and she retired in Phoenix. She said, I get up every morning and say, Thank you, God. I do the same thing now.

I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.

Because of the Lebanese civil war, I had a scattered childhood. I had to build my own connections to each country we moved to.

I will not accept that a Lebanese political party participates in maneuvers that serve the interests of Iran.

Whenever my husband and I order delivery from our favorite Lebanese place, the center of the meal isnt the chicken shawarma or the mixed grill for two - its the potent garlic sauce, toum.

The Depression did more to me than being a little Lebanese kid did.

I took my hands from my pockets and ran them along the bricks' gnarled and pitted surface. They seemed light and ready to crumble. I felt the impulse to kiss them, so as to experience more closely a texture that reminded me of blocks of pumice or halva from a Lebanese delicatessen.

'Harat' is actually - it's a Lebanese dialect word. It comes from 'the mapmaker,' somebody who makes a map. And it basically means somebody who tells fibs or exaggerate tales a little bit.

The [Israelis] believed - they were possessed of an absolute certainty and conviction - that 'terrorists' were in Chatila. How could I explain to them that the terrorists had left, that the terrorists had worn Israeli uniforms, that the terrorists had been sent into Chatila by Israeli officers, that the victims of the terrorists were not Israelis but Palestinians and Lebanese?

The cedars 'know the history of the earth better than history itself.' If this was so, it was little wonder that they had clung to life only here, up in these high altitudes where the mountains, ice and wind ensured that the Lebanese who so often took the name of the cedars in vain would rarely appear.

For better or worse, Hezbollah remains a major player in contemporary Lebanese politics, as El Masri points out, and the willingness of tech companies to cave to US pressure has an immeasurable impact on the country's political scene.

God willing, we shall come to a stage where the world looks at the Palestinian question, and Palestinian rights on Palestinian national soil, as well as the questions of the occupied Syrian and Lebanese territories. These are the bases on which peace will be built.

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 — and I finally reached the conclusion that the Lebanese was a man who was in love with life, and that his carefree, enormous laugh— head thrown back, eyes closed in a grimace of mirth — celebrated a perfect, a total understanding between the two, an agreement which nothing ever managed to disturb: happiness, in fact. A beautiful affair: life and Habib were inseparable.

The weapons were delivered aboard the Sky Bird in mid-1992 – with two UN arms embargoes being violated by a single deal. In order to avoid detection, the shipping manifests were altered. Repeating their previous ruse, it was claimed that the shipment was intended for the Lebanese Christian militia.27 Umag, a port city in Croatia, was the real destination, with an end-user certificate provided by the Finance Minister, Martinovic.

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.