Frankenstein in Baghdad

Anyone who puts on a crown, even if only as an experiment, will end up looking for a kingdom.

Because I'm made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds - ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes - I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I'm the first true Iraqi citizen, he (the Whatsitsname) thinks.

Each of us has a measure of criminality.

We try to avoid meeting one another, although we are moving around in search of one another.

Why did he see other people dying on the news and yet he was still alive?

I was not a murderer: I had merely plucked the fruit of death before it fell to the ground.

What can I say, Mr President? Do your job properly, and I won't tell stories about you.

He believed that emotions changed memories, that when you lost the emotion associated with a particular event, you lost an important part of the event.

death gives the dead an aura of dignity, so they say, and makes the living feel guilty in a way that compels them to forgive those who are gone.

The king ordered that the saint be placed in the olive press until his flesh was torn to pieces and he died. They then threw him out of the city, but the Lord Jesus gathered the pieces together and brought him back to life, and he went back into the city. —The Story of St. George, the Great Martyr

Every day we're dying from the same fear of dying.

Death stalked the city like the plague.

There were serious things happening, and Hadi was merely a conduit, like a simple father or mother who produces a son who is a prophet, a savior, or an evil leader. They didn't exactly create the storm that followed. They were just the channel for something that was more powerful and significant than themselves.

They all dreamed something about Hasib. Parts of one dream made up for parts missing in another. A little dream filled a gap in a big one, and the threads stitched together to re-create a dream body for Hasib, to go with his soul, which was still hovering over all their heads and seeking the rest it could not find. Where was the body to which it should return in order to take its place among those who live in a state of limbo?