Lesley Hazleton · 239 pages
Rating: (5K votes)
“Assassination creates an instant hero of its target. Any past sins are not just forgiven but utterly forgotten.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“Man journeys in darkness, and his destiny journeys toward him,” he said, and traveled on.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“If there was a single moment it all began, it was that of Muhammad's death. Even the Prophet was mortal. That was the problem. It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“In Shia lore, Fatima lives on in another dimension to witness her sons’ suffering and to weep for them. She is the Holy Mother, whose younger son would sacrifice himself to redeem humanity just as had the son of that other great mother, Mary. Like her, Fatima is often called the Virgin as a sign of her spiritual purity. Like her, she will mourn her offspring until the Day of Judgment,”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“Arabic is a subtle and sinuous language. Like all Semitic languages, it plays on words, taking a three-consonant root and building on it to create what sometimes seems an infinite number of meanings. Even the exact same word can have different connotations, depending on the context. Perhaps the best-known example is jihad, struggle, which can be either the inner striving to live the Islamic life and attain a higher level of spiritual consciousness, or the external armed confrontation with those seen as enemies of Islam.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“Arabia would not exert political power again for more than a thousand years, until the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect emerged from the central highlands in the eighteenth century to carry out violent raids against Shia shrines in Iraq and even against the holy places of Mecca and Medina.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“But raw numbers can be misleading. In the Middle East heartland of Islam, the Shia are closer to fifty percent, and wherever oil reserves are richest—Iran, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf coast, including eastern Saudi Arabia—they are in the majority.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“Things shouldn’t hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you’re highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and bang, you’re an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“A wife is her husband’s richest treasure, a helpmeet, a steadying column. A vineyard with no hedge will be overrun; a man with no wife becomes a helpless wanderer,”’ he quoted,”
― Donna Leon, quote from The Death of Faith
“Doing an Injury puts you below your Enemy; Revenging one makes you but even with him; Forgiving it sets you above him.”
― Benjamin Franklin, quote from Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack
“You’ve not been sleeping proper,” Byrd said accusingly. “I can tell. You’ve been a-wallowing on your pillow; your hair’s a right rat’s nest!”
“I do apologize, Tom,” Grey said politely. “Perhaps I should sleep upright in a chair, in order to make your work easier?”
(Haunted Soldier)”
― Diana Gabaldon, quote from Lord John And The Hand Of Devils
“[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings --- the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite [...] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Shadow Lines
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