Miranda Emmerson Quotes

“My uncle read me Omar Khayyam. In Arabic. Not Turkish or even English. I tried so hard to understand it. I would ask him what it all meant but he always said the pleasure was in the finding out... the discovery. He said you can keep some poems by you your whole life and they will only reveal parts of themselves to you when you are ready to hear them. (Ottmar)”

“I feel like I could disappear because I'm not real to other people.”

“She became fascinated by the statue of Edith Cavell and would stand at the base of it in the freezing cold of a December morning, looking up: -Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone-. Sometimes those words made her cry. The tears would come uncontrollably and they would not stop. And in those moments Anna found forgiveness and it made her free. But they were only moments. Forgiveness is a hard thing to hang on to.”

“But life. It rushes by and then you think you'll see people... You think you'll do things and have time for this and time for that... And there is never time. This is what I have learned, Anna, I have learned that there is never as much time as you think there is. -(Ottmar)”

“It (urban peacekeeping) was quite a task, requiring a permanent balancing act between communities, each with their own interests, festivals, traditions and historical rivalries imported from the wide-open spaces of the countryside into close quarters.”

“New York presented a paradox. While foreigners thought of New York has the symbol of America, many Americans viewed the city with some suspicion as the country's most foreign.”

“The Shah "had traveled to Europe and had been fascinated by the march of progress he observed there. But, once back in Terhan, this fascination had not been translated into sustained Persian modernization, but rather dissipated in the Shah's intense but short-lived passion for the latest novelties. "He is continually taking up and pushing some new scheme or invention which, when the caprice has been gratified, is neglected or allowed to expire".”

“Nationalist (forces around the world) could now more readily communicate and share their grievances, viewing themselves as similar groups, engaged in a common struggle for greater autonomy against control exerted from London or Paris.”

“The city (of Vienna) had an unerring tradition of celebrating some of it's greatest composers after it had around them to die in poverty.”

“Apparently, a week Japan was laughable; but a strong Japan was immediately transformed into the prime example of a "Yellow Peril". Might Japan forever be stuck in a kind of no man's land between East and West, not allowed to assimilate into the international order of the Western nations as an equal, forever grouped with the countries of the East among which she felt herself superior, and respected fully by neither group?”