The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor.
I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed’s coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.
If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.
Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven.
It is difficult to keep quiet when everything is being done wrong, but the less you lose your temper the greater your advantage. Also then you will not go mad yourself.
A thick headcloth forms a good protection against the sun, and if you wear a hat your best Arab friends will be ashamed of you in public.
Isn’t it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it’s we who led our parents on to bear us, and it’s our unborn children who make our flesh itch.
The Beduin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his sour this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free.
The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.
The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.
The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.
He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed...
He feared his maturity as it grew upon him with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.
I haven’t got a heart: only the former site of one, with a monument there to say that it has been removed and the area it occupied turned into a public garden, in pursuance of the slum-clearance scheme.
Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
As long as the arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.
Dream your dreams with open eyes and make them come true.
We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.
A skittish motorbike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness.