The Almond Tree

You cannot go back and make a new start, but you can start now and make a new ending

Hatred is self-punishment. Do you think they're feeling bad because you hate them?

Success is not about never falling, but about rising every time you fall

Courage, I realised, was not the absence of fear: it was the absence of selfishness; putting someone else's interest before one's own.

He who aims too high will get a sore neck

Many great men can attribute their success to the fact that they didn't have the advantages other men had

People hate out of fear and ignorance. If they could just get to know the people they hate, and focus on their common interests, they could overcome that hatred.

Before you judge a person, try to imagine how you would feel if the same things had happened to you.

He looked me directly in the eye. 'So you live in America?' 'We do.' I smiled. He stopped, opened his backpack, pulled out an empty tear gas grenade and handed it to me. 'I believe it was a present from your country.' Majid smiled. 'Tell your friends thanks. We got their grenade.

Don't allow guilt to enter your heart, because it's a disease, like cancer, that'll eat away at you until there's nothing left.

The world should have stopped, but it didn't.

I had no idea words could have so much power and beauty.

Permission to buy apricots and oranges from my own trees, the ones my great grandfather planted and i kept alive in drought and war

Throughout history the conquerors have always treated the conquered this way. The bad ones need to believe we're inferior to justify the way they treat us. If they only could realize that we're all the same.

And it suddenly occured to me that maybe peace was possible.

Success is not about never failing, but about rising every time you fall.

You cannot go back and make a new start, but you can start now and make a new ending. [p. 115]

One cannot live on anger, my son.

The hardest part for us was watching them harvest our Shamouti oranges.Those were our favourites, thick skinned, seedless and juicy.When the wind was strong, the scent of their blossoms in the spring and their fruit in the summer still reached us.

Wasn't there any balance in the world?

You cannot go back and make a new start, but you can start now and make a new ending.