"When there was a conflict between independence and obedience, I have often chosen the latter for the fear of losing the love of the people close to me. With the help of distance and time, I see now that the security I chose was a false security. If there is such a thing as security in a relationship, I am guessing that it would result from the capacity to sustain love and respect in the presence of dissent."

p38: "There is too much complexity in ‘Asia’ for one term to hold it…Arab, Indian, Malay, Thai, Chinese, Japanese."

"Critiques are bounded by some of the same narrowed contours as the systems of power they seek to dismantle."

p39: "The tools of thinking are always in part tied to the repressive regimes they wish to challenge.  I therefore continue to look for what I do not already know."

p41: "Deleuze… privileges difference over uniformity… and the nomad’s wanderings over the sedentary life."

p43: "Writing is an act of resistance."

"Deleuze privileges investigation more than knowing…"

"Claude Levi-Strauss says: "One cannot fully enjoy the other, identify with him, and yet at the same time remain different."

…to begin to investigate the need for superiority is nearly to have stepped down and into the rest of humanity.

Today people still have the nerve to shoot a film like Cold Mountain (2003), a film that’s set in the 19th century in the southern states, where we see Nicole Kidman in a bonnet and not a single black person. And nobody gets excited. Insane.

pg 5: Israel, initially founded on the idea of freedom for Jews, is also an apartheid state practicing racism against Palestinians.

pg 6: I move beyond the liberal/Western notion of diversity which accepts out of necessity, rather than choice, that people will differ.  This means seeking out cultural differences in order to deepen understanding by sharing and decentering the self with a newly fulfilling complexity.

pg 21: Jihad, at its best, and in its meaning for most Muslims the world over, is the struggle to find justice, equality, and freedom for the internal and external self.

pg 28: [My father] used to say that the only way we change is if we think we have to.

pg 30: Seeing anew means subverting the distorting of before with a willingness to be deeply uncomfortable with the self.

pg 34: China was the most advanced economy of the medieval world. 

Bourgeois culture is seductive and captivating and it is oppressive and isolating.

Thinking and seeing before the moment — its history — and after — its future possibilities — demands complex knowing.

• Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstien, USSR, 1925);
• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Murnau, US, 1927);
• At Land (Deren, US, 1944);
• Peeping Tom (Powell, UK, 1960);
• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, France, 1964);
• Blow-Up (Antonioni, Italy, 1966);
• Playtime (Tati, France, 1967);
• Memories of Underdevelopment (Alia, Cuba, 1968);
• Nashville (Altman, US, 1975);
• The China Syndrome (Bridges, US, 1979);
• Stardust Memories (Allen, US, 1980);
• Born in Flame (Borden, US, 1983);
• Isle of Flowers (Furtado, Brazil, 1989);
• Mujeria: Primitive and Proud (Hidalgo-de la Riva, US, 1992);
• From the Journals of Jane Seberg (Rappaport, US, 1995);
• Divine Intervention: A Chronicle of Love and Pain (Suleiman, Palestine, 2002).