“Gabriel Levin’s book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East.”

Clear moments are so short. There is much more darkness.

I don’t need to explain why it’s a curse.

And also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can’t understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.

More ocean than terra firma. More shadow than form.

This day’s nothingness as if from spite became a flame and scorched the lips of children and poets.

What’s astonishing and refreshing is his ability to combine the reporter’s perspective with a deep knowledge of poetry, including pre-Islamic Arab poems.

Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it’s an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely.

The odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed.

And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease,

Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head.

But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition…

I drink from a small spring, / my thirst excedes the ocean.

A brilliant poet is at work here-a poet in the rugged landscape of conflict and pain.

Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can.

As if entrapped in a tropical heatwave, with dozens of whirlwinds swirling in one’s mind, one thinks of a way out, or a way in: out of the scorching bosom of a volcano, and in – into the centre of a raging hurricane.

A blessing because it brings about a movement, an energy which, when it peaks, creates a poem. Or a moment of happiness.