Top 45 Sayed Kashua Quotes

A trip to Tel Aviv is a ritual. I always wear the same clothes to Tel Aviv: black pants and a blue-checked shirt that I bought especially from Ralph Lauren.

I conduct all my nighttime activities under the assumption that my wife is awake, that she never falls asleep.

The smell of onion is the most effective thing for relieving stinging eyes irritated by tear gas.

Sometimes it seems that what really worries the Israeli governments, even more than the Muslim Brotherhood, is the real Egypt.

I once wrote that the first week in Jerusalem was the hardest week of my life. I was different, other; my clothes were different, as was my language. All of the classes were in Hebrew – science, bible, literature. I sat there not understanding one word. When I tried to speak, everyone would laugh at me.

Somehow it seems that all parents are certain that they themselves were victims of abuse in school and that they will not allow this to happen to their children. Even though children can also be the cruelest group imaginable – especially the cutest of them.

Back in Israel, I would spend much effort and plenty of money on presents when I went abroad, even if it was only for two days.

My children don’t even know who Fairuz is – a horrifying thought.

Thanksgiving is the only day of the year when most of the stores here are closed during the day and reopen after midnight. Even restaurants shut down for the holiday, except for the fast-food chains.

I’m totally secular, but I’m scared like hell of God.

When I come to the airport, they always send me with all the other Israeli Arabs to the foreign workers’ line. I don’t mind. I feel like I belong more with all the people from abroad and the foreign workers than in the Israelis’ line.

It sometimes seems that the only plan the Israeli government has for the Palestinians is for them to sit quietly while Israel does whatever takes its fancy, equipped with its army, with laws it promulgated, and with courts it established.

I don’t know how it works with the Jews, but here in Beit Safafa, as in every self-respecting Arab community that is respected in turn by the state, there are no street names and no house numbers.

What kind of people will these ghettos of Palestinians produce? What form of morality, national consciousness and hope will people be left with after so many years of stifling occupation and a sense of hopelessness?

Israeli independence – what we Arabs call al-Naqba, ‘The Catastrophe’ – it created Palestinian identity more than anything else.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.

Somehow, the rare trips to Tel Aviv give me the feeling that I have a career.

It always seems to me that my life would look completely different if I didn’t have to take care of the rent.

There is really no place for individuals in Israel.

Everything in London is quite good, apart from the weather: it’s cold and rainy there, and the winter is long.

When I was 14, I saw a library for the first time.

They’re completely American. When I served my son falafel in a pita the other day, he said, ‘Daddy, this taco is very good.’

Sometimes I can write very angry columns, but I know that it doesn’t work.

Since being on television, I have felt that my brain is degenerating.

There’s a lot of hypocrisy and condescension in Israel’s institutionalized support for Mubarak’s tyrannical rule, in its backing of a corrupt leader who established a brutal secret police state to suppress his citizens and keep their mouths shut.

I wish I could be proud of being an Israeli citizen, but how can I do that when I’m not really recognized as a full citizen?

All Israelis think Arabs steal cars.

Maybe I would go back to West Jerusalem without too much bother if I could lie to my kids and tell them they are equal citizens in a democratic state.

I always envied them, the owners of the cars with the white plates who can be seen around Jerusalem. I always wanted to be one of them. We call them U.N., even though U.N. are generally foreign correspondents with leased cars and yellow plates.

Well, you can’t say you are lucky to live in Champaign, but I was lucky to be at the University of Illinois. It’s a very international cosmopolitan community. That’s very helpful.

Many Israelis are educating their kids in a very nationalist, powerful identity, since kindergarten – and the Arabs as well.

Somehow, since I became a family, every minute in which I am alone and not listening to two kids screaming in stereo feels like a vacation.

Is it too late to institute a leap year and mandate that the holidays fall on regular, convenient dates – so that Id al-Fitr will come, say, in the spring and Id al-Adha in early summer?

I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother.

Americans are connected to the situation in the West Bank and Gaza and Israel because, generally speaking, Jewish Americans were always there, and many American Jewish people connect their nationality to the Israeli one.

I don’t really wake up in the morning and say, ‘Ohmigod, I’m a Palestinian in a Jewish state.’ I wake up in the morning and say, ‘Ohmigod, I have to make sandwiches for my kids.’

It’s the friends that make you survive this flat place called the Midwest.

Christmas is relentless. It’s around the clock. I sit with my little ones in front of the TV screen, and we watch movie after movie after movie.

When Jewish youths walk down the street and demand the death of Arabs simply because they’re Arabs, then I’ve lost my own small battle.

I hate flying. The first time I flew with my wife, Najat, was the first time I’d ever flown in my life, and that was just a short flight to Turkey. I spent the whole time with my shirt pulled over my head. Then I got used to it.

I hate it when I have to abandon my children. I politely turn down most of the invitations I get from abroad and try to fly only when it’s absolutely necessary.

If there was genuine desire on the Israeli side, even without a solution, it would be possible to solve a large percentage of the problems between Israelis and Palestinians by means of simple statements from the Israelis.

I’m afraid of a gas leak, although I installed detectors. I’m afraid of a blown fuse that could cause a fire, and that’s why I don’t turn on electrical appliances at night.

All in all, we Muslims have only two holidays, and they’re always getting moved around from season to season, from month to month, because we’re dependent on the moon and not the sun, and unlike the Jews, we haven’t created a leap year, so we have no Adar Bet.

Israel defines Palestinians more than anything else.