My Armenian Quotes

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately. Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.

"Who Remembers the Armenians?" I remember them and I ride the nightmare bus with them each night and my coffee, this morning I'm drinking it with them You, murderer - Who remembers you?

But history does matter. There are lines connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans. They are obviously morbid. Really, how much genocide can one sentence handle? You get the point. Besides, my grandparents’ story deserves to be told, regardless of their nationalities.

My uncle Khosrove became very irritated and shouted, It’s no harm. What is the loss of a horse? Haven’t we all lost the homeland? What is this crying over a horse?

Do not tell me that it is not God-like to get angry or go into a fit of rage. God himself when enraged will grasp a star and hurl it through the heavens. And at night, you can see bits of the star flashing through the sky, fallen apart merely by the shear force of which it was thrown. Know when He is angry and stay out of His way… And the same holds true for my grandson.” Yervant Yacoubian.

Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter—with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command—and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad—that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?

On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing photographs of Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Sandy Koufax, Irving Berlin, Estee Lauder, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is something faintly kitsch about this, as there is in the habit of those Jewish papers that annually list Jewish prize-winners from the Nobel to the Oscars. (It is apparently true that the London Jewish Chronicle once reported the result of a footrace under the headline 'Goldstein Fifteenth.') However, I think I may send a contribution. Other small 'races' have come from unpromising and hazardous beginnings to achieve great things—no Roman would have believed that the brutish inhabitants of the British Isles could ever amount to much—and other small 'races,' too, like Gypsies and Armenians, have outlived determined attempts to eradicate and exterminate them. But there is something about the persistence, both of the Jews and their persecutors, that does seem to merit a museum of its own.

She is the centre of my world. The Armenians believed that Ararat was the centre of the world; but the mountain was divided between three great empires, and the Armenians ended up with none of it, so I shan’t continue this comparison. I love you.

Good morning, sons of my friends, he said. What is the name of your horse? My Heart, my cousin Mourad said in Armenian.

—Tú hablas sin palabras. Todos estamos siempre hablando sin palabras. —¿Y para qué valen las palabras, entonces? —No valen para mucho, casi nunca. La mayor parte de las veces, únicamente para ocultar aquello que realmente quieres decir, o algo que quieres saber.

And then the Turkish gendarmes and zaptieh went from Armenian house to Armenian house confiscating weapons or anything they thought might be one. If possible, the priest would come to warn each family that the gendarmes or the zaptieh were coming so they could prepare. The zaptieh knocked on Armenian doors any time of day or night, and they preferred coming at night. They came to the Kazanjians, and the Arslanians, and the Meugerditchians, and to the Hovsepians and Haroutiunians and to the Shekerlemedjians. And finally, they came to our house in the evening after dinner. Three men in dark brown uniforms walked into the foyer and through the courtyard and said to my mother that if she did not hand over every gun in the house, we would be killed.

One night, unable to sleep, I tiptoed into the hallway and overheard my grandfather telling a table of acquaintances about the expensive Armenian cognac with which he had once plied the surgeon who was going to remove my grandmother's gallbladder the next morning. They drank so much tat the surgeon was still drunk when he picked up the scalpel. The table roared, though my grandmother did not.

Armenian Cognac A bottle of cognac from Yerevan is on my kitchen table as closed as that history and as silent If I broke it down I'd lose a hundred years of love and if I opened it the ancestors hanging here in black and white would come down from the walls to have a glass with me I know a history that's been forgotten and I know why that bottle of cognac stands with such singular pride.... If I broke it now I'd lose a hundred years of my people's history

Not only were the young Turks unaware of their past, but the Turkish Government was “buying history” at American universities by giving them large endowments to keep its barbaric past from the American university agenda—a past filled with such atrocities that it had inspired Hitler. “Who remembers the Armenians?” Hitler had asked to justify his slaughter of the Jews and other designated enemies of the state. Indeed. And who even knew the Pontic Greeks ever existed?

Not even children were spared. To see history repeating itself, and the calamities of the past unfolding again, spelled out in the eyes of the victims and survivors, was unbearable. To witness rape and slavery practiced and legitimized, to witness it happen in the 21st century was hideous. Girls as young as 8-9 years old and women all ages were being brutally violated and sold, sometimes for $10. My heart sank with their screams, and we had to do something to help them.

I lay in my sleeping bag, aching all over; and fervently hoped humans never made it to Mars. We didn’t deserve a new world; we’d just wreck it all over again. As a kid I’d genuinely believed that the discovery of alien life, whether sentient beings or microbes, would change lives, incite a revolution near-holy in its repercussions . At the very least people would be kinder to each other, knowing we’re all of a kind, earthlings every one, whether Turkish or Armenian, Indian or Pakistani, Tibetan or Uyghur or Han Chinese. We’d collectively awaken to the fact that we’re all lost in this mystery together.

I had sat at table with an old, semiliterate man in a dirty jacket and canvas boots and felt in my heart an excitement I had seldom known. By then Armenia and Russia no longer seemed to matter. I was no longer thinking about the nature of greatness or the characteristics of a particular nation. There was only the human soul, the soul that did not lose faith as it suffered anguish and torment among the scree and vineyards of Palestine, the soul that remains equally human and good in a little village near Penza, under the sky of India, and in a northern yurt—because there is good in people everywhere, simply because they are human beings.

But that's crazy, " George said. "How can I be the Average American Man? I'm only five foot eight and my name is Blaxter spelled with an "l", and I'm of Armenian and Latvian ancestry and I was born in Ship's Bottom, New Jersey. What's that average of, for Chrissakes? They better recheck their results. What they're looking for is some Iowa farmboy with blond hair and a Mercury and 2.4 children." "That's the old, outdated stereotype," the reporter said. "America today is composed of racial and ethnic minorities whose sheer ubiquity precludes the possibility of choosing an Anglo-Saxon model. The average man of today has to be unique to be average, if you see what I mean." The Shaggy Average American Man Story

After the plates are removed by the silent and swift waiting staff, General Çiller leans forward and says across the table to Güney, ‘What’s this I’m reading in Hürriyet about Strasbourg breaking up the nation?’ ‘It’s not breaking up the nation. It’s a French motion to implement European Regional Directive 8182 which calls for a Kurdish Regional Parliament.’ ‘And that’s not breaking up the nation?’ General Çiller throws up his hands in exasperation. He’s a big, square man, the model of the military, but he moves freely and lightly ‘The French prancing all over the legacy of Atatürk? What do you think, Mr Sarioğlu?’ The trap could not be any more obvious but Ayşe sees Adnan straighten his tie, the code for, Trust me, I know what I’m doing, ‘What I think about the legacy of Atatürk, General? Let it go. I don’t care. The age of Atatürk is over.’ Guests stiffen around the table, breath subtly indrawn; social gasps. This is heresy. People have been shot down in the streets of Istanbul for less. Adnan commands every eye. ‘Atatürk was father of the nation, unquestionably. No Atatürk, no Turkey. But, at some point every child has to leave his father. You have to stand on your own two feet and find out if you’re a man. We’re like kids that go on about how great their dads are; my dad’s the strongest, the best wrestler, the fastest driver, the biggest moustache. And when someone squares up to us, or calls us a name or even looks at us squinty, we run back shouting ‘I’ll get my dad, I’ll get my dad!’ At some point; we have to grow up. If you’ll pardon the expression, the balls have to drop. We talk the talk mighty fine: great nation, proud people, global union of the noble Turkic races, all that stuff. There’s no one like us for talking ourselves up. And then the EU says, All right, prove it. The door’s open, in you come; sit down, be one of us. Move out of the family home; move in with the other guys. Step out from the shadow of the Father of the Nation. ‘And do you know what the European Union shows us about ourselves? We’re all those things we say we are. They weren’t lies, they weren’t boasts. We’re good. We’re big. We’re a powerhouse. We’ve got an economy that goes all the way to the South China Sea. We’ve got energy and ideas and talent - look at the stuff that’s coming out of those tin-shed business parks in the nano sector and the synthetic biology start-ups. Turkish. All Turkish. That’s the legacy of Atatürk. It doesn’t matter if the Kurds have their own Parliament or the French make everyone stand in Taksim Square and apologize to the Armenians. We’re the legacy of Atatürk. Turkey is the people. Atatürk’s done his job. He can crumble into dust now. The kid’s come right. The kid’s come very right. That’s why I believe the EU’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us because it’s finally taught us how to be Turks.’ General Çiller beats a fist on the table, sending the cutlery leaping. ‘By God, by God; that’s a bold thing to say but you’re exactly right.

are an Armenian,” says the Turk with the handgun. “I am.” “Where are you going?” “Damascus.” “Why?” “My sister lives there.” “What do you do?” “I’m an engineer. I’m working on the Baghdad Railway—the spur from Aleppo to Nusaybin.” “The British have captured Nasiriyah.” “I hadn’t heard that.” He nods. “Had you heard that an Armenian murdered a Turkish

Her name was Heranuş. She was the granddaughter of Herabet Gadaryan, and the only daughter of İsguhi and Hovannes Gadaryan.    She passed a happy childhood in the village of Habab, near Palu, until she reached the fourth grade.    Then suddenly, she was thrown into the painful times about which she would say, ‘May those days vanish never to return’.    Heranuş lost her entire family and never saw them again. She was given a new name, to live in a new family.    She forgot her mother tongue and her religion, and though she did not once in her life complain about this, she never ever forgot her name, her village, her mother, her father, her grandfather or her close relations. She lived until the age of 95, always hoping that she might be able to see them and embrace them again one day. Perhaps it was this hope that allowed her to live so long; until her very last days, her mind remained sharp. Last week, we lost Heranuş, our grandmother, and sent her to her eternal resting place. We are hoping that this announcement might reach the relations (our relations) that we were never able to find while she was alive, that they may share our grief, in the hope that ‘those days may vanish, never to return.

I was by no means a perfect father or grandfather and made many mistakes throughout my life. But my father, who was a rebel in his time, once told me the following: ‘Victory in life is the result of good decisions. Good decisions are the result of experience. Experience is the result of bad decisions.

I do hear what you are saying. If you hated what you do and wanted to change, you could. I know you could. Do not ever think that life has to be one way or another. You can change it. Just put your mind to it like you do now with your perfection with the opium. The same is true for me. I know I can change my life, get out of the black market if I want. And now, that is what I am going to do.” “Yes, but you have somewhere to escape. You can go back home to Romania. Where can I go?” Tavid asked. Aldo paused. “You would be surprised.” The

My friend, you do not always take my advice but I am going to give it to you one last time.

When Tavid was younger and I was teaching him the skills to protect himself, I would never brag or even talk about people that I had killed. This was not something to be discussed openly. It was private. Between you and God and not to be openly displayed with friends or at a dinner table. Even though his ferocity at times was more intense than my own, he has still obeyed this principle.” – Yervant Yacoubian “I

Is someone going to tell me if I am about to get shot?” Tavid said. “My

It is easy to get side-tracked when you are a person of many abilities. I would have preferred that Tavid focused strictly on getting to Cyprus. But these are for selfish reasons. And I am even more guilty of this phenomenon. This whole business of leaving for Cypress. My detour into prison. This huge war. It is obvious now to me that there is no predicting what events will happen when you change your path in life.” – Yervant Yacoubian Returning

I am not afraid of death but look forward to this next adventure. Not that I want to die this day, I have too much to do still! But I look forward to seeing old friends, including Armen Eftendelian. I am sure that we will both call each other vulgar names when we are reunited, he will yell at me, telling me how stubborn I am and I will call him a fool mixed with my favorite Turkish profanities. Afterwards we will embrace. For we will have an eternity to enjoy each other’s arguments on life and death.” –

When I was Tavid’s age, my conscience was asleep. I could kill without hesitation or remorse. It was an act that I was comfortable with, never having second thoughts. But when we had my daughter, and then later with my grandchildren, well, things slowly began to change. It was not as easy to kill, especially if the victim was younger. I found myself hesitating and this became dangerous. Or the death of a child in the village would bring on emotions that I did not have before. But I am glad for these changes and growth, as I know will happen with my grandson.” – Yervant Yacoubian For

Many have forgotten that the Germans were in bed with the Turks during this atrocity of a war. Do not tell me that the German military and advisors did not know or help with the destruction of my race. And after the Turks for the most part succeeded in their plans, what did the Germans decide to do some eighteen years later?” – Yervant Yacoubian Nearly

I have lost my daughter, I know that now. I have treated her poorly and hope that some day she will forgive me for the way I have treated her. And I am not here to bring her home, only to tell her how sorry I am for being an idiot all these years. I would like to speak to your son and apologize to him as well. He, he is a reflection of myself that I have fought against for years.” Aldo

The next time you try to save my life, do me a favor and do not get yourself shot! Now… Now I have to save your goddamned life! So sit here and shut up!” Tahir

I felt this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstacy, nor enjoyment that Masha excited in me, but a painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling as though we all four had lost something important and essential to life which we should never find again.

Had I been a witness to a memory of hers so terrible that it could only be said to me, an eleven-year-old, half delirious with fever, lying in bed between darkness and light? My grandmother had spoken so emphatically that day, in clipped, deliberate speech, as if to say, 'This is a moment to listen.

The old country. That phrase came up now and then. A phrase that seemed to have a lock on it. I knew it meant Armenia, but it made me uneasy. If I asked about the old country, the adults would change the subject. Once my mother said, ‘It’s an ancient place, it’s not really around anymore.’ Where had it gone? I asked myself.

My grandmother’s hands floated like wings of bone in the dark, then they were birds, then small disks of light and then bones again, and then it was dawn.

I came to realize that my grandmother’s stories were part of time and not part of time, part of place and not part of place, part of the stuff that is stored in the mind’s honeycomb.

I realized that she was my beloved witness, and I the receiver of her story. When I was a boy, she had showered me with love; now as a man, I could return that love.

Since there was no picture of the old country in our house and since I didn't have one etched in my mind, the old country came to mean my grandmother. Whatever it was, she was. Whatever she was, it was.

In his memoirs, Celal Bey recalled what it felt like to witness what were, in effect, death marches. “I was like a person sitting beside a river,” he wrote, but “with no means of rescuing anyone from it”: Instead of water, blood was flowing down the river. Thousands of innocent children, blameless old men, helpless women and strong youngsters were streaming downriver towards oblivion, straight to dust and ashes. Anyone I could hold onto with my bare hands, with my fingernails, I saved. The rest, I believe, went down the river, never to return.

Trevor: how dismissive he’s always been about my Armenianness; how while I was on the phone with Diana and said a couple of phrases in Armenian, he jokingly told me to “stop talking that devil language.

You are here discussing the so-called Armenian genocide when there are hundreds of documents proving that it ever existed. In fact, my ancestors are from the Mardin region, where Armenians committed genocides against us. It’s documented in my family that Armenians came in the night, murdered the men, raped the women, beheaded—

She inherited it from her Armenian immigrant parents, and even after she met my dad and moved in with him, she kept the place.

This city was so cosmopolitan once," the cook continued, breaking the mackerel's backbone first above its tail, then below its head. "We had Jewish neighbors, lots of them. We also had Greek neighbors, and Armenian neighbors. . . . As a boy I used to buy fish from Greek fishermen. My mother's tailor was Armenian. My father's boss was Jewish. You know, we were all intermingled." "Ask him why things have changed," Armanoush turned to Asya. "Because Istanbul is not a city," the cook remarked, his face lighting up with the importance of the statement he was about to make. "It looks like a city but it is not. It is a city-boat. We live in a vessel!" With that he held the fish by its head and started moving the backbone right and left. For a second Armanoush imagined the mackerel to be made of porcelain, fearing it would shatter to pieces in the cook's hands. But in a few seconds the man had managed to take the whole bone out. Pleased with himself, he continued. "We are all passengers here, we come and go in clusters, Jews go, Russians come, my brother's neighborhood is full of Moldovans.... Tomorrow they will go, others will arrive. That's how it is....

I reconstructed the first page, the paragraphs, the paler lines where my fingers had gone numb as they typed, Tabriz, the poplars' shadow over icy ground, the passing silhouettes of scoundrels in caps, coming to the Armenian café to drink away the money from their shady deals. That whole steaming, darkened, irretrievable winter, written down by gas lamp or on tables in the bazaar where partridges fought in their cages, by someone I no longer was.

This relatively hands-off style of rule practiced by the Eastern European empires was born of pragmatism. Social divisions were not a flaw to be overcome, but a tool to be used. In these realms, universal citizenship did not exist. People lived not as individuals but as parts of wider social estates, each of which came with its own set of privileges and prohibitions. Everyone was discriminated against to some extent, except for the sultan or czar. Everyone also had a function. To most people, before the arrival of modernity, the idea of equality before the law was unthinkable. What mattered most in life was to be allowed to fulfill their role undisturbed. Meanwhile, what mattered most to rulers was that the sum total of these various roles added up to them staying in power. For this, outsiders could be just as useful as locals and often showed themselves to be more dependable. The process of inviting helpful strangers into Eastern Europe began very early. Eastern European monarchs began looking abroad for talent in the Middle Ages Compared to Western Europe, the East was under-populated, lacking sities and the specialized craftsmen and traders who inhabited them. Eastern rulers also sat uneasily on the intersection of multiple frontiers: between pagan and Christian, Christian and Muslim, and Catholic and Orthodox. Because of this, they needed all the help they could get cultivating, defending, and administering their realms. In the eleventh century, A Hungarian king lectured his son about the usefulness of immigrants: 'As guests come from various areas and lands, so they bring with them various languages and customs, various examples and forms of armaments, which adorn and glorify the royal court. . . . For a kingdom of one language and one custom is weak and fragile. Therefore, my son, I order that you should feed them with goodwill and honor them so that they will prefer to live with you rather than inhabit any other place.' The young prince took his father's advice to heart. By the thirteenth century, the kingdom of Hungary harbored, within its ragile borders, groups of Jews, Muslims, Armenians, Slavs, Italians, Franks, Spaniards, and Germans

I believe that my parents’ call to the ministry actually drove them crazy. They were happiest when farthest away from their missionary work, wandering the back streets of Florence; or, rather, when they turned their missionary work into something very unmissionary-like, such as talking about art history instead of Christ. Perhaps this is because at those times they were farthest away from other people’s expectations. I think religion was actually their source of tragedy. Mom tried to dress, talk, and act like anything but what she was. Dad looked flustered if fundamentalists, especially Calvinist theologians, would intrude into a discussion and try to steer it away from art or philosophy so they could discuss the finer points of arcane theology. And Dad was always in a better mood before leading a discussion or before giving a lecture on a cultural topic, than he was before preaching on Sunday. I remember Dad screaming at Mom one Sunday; then he threw a potted ivy at her. Then he put on his suit and went down to preach his Sunday sermon in our living-room chapel. It was not the only Sunday Dad switched gears from rage to preaching. And this was the same chapel that the Billy Graham family sometimes dropped by to worship in, along with their Swiss-Armenian, multimillionaire in-laws, after Billy—like some Middle Eastern potentate—arranged for his seventeen-year-old daughter’s marriage to the son of a particularly wealthy donor who lived up the road from us in the ski resort of Villars. Did

We were not interested in making life better for some some people. We wanted everyone to thrive and accomplish their dreams in Los Angeles: gays, straights, blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, Russians, Armenians, Pacific Islanders, and many others. Even when my detractors couldn't believe that I stood for equality and fairness, I'd always govern with those guiding principles.

Jesus, the world’s a slaughterhouse. Really it is. If you’re weak they’re going to cut your throat—ask the Armenians, ask the Jews. The bad people want it their way, my friend. And how badly they want it is the study of a lifetime.

It was the one time of year when everyone on our street was united—Pakistani Muslims, Christians, Armenians, African students—everyone except my father. He

DIVING BOARD NOTES Odie tells Albert, a friend the family knew back in Iran, that I had a cocktail party, and they met my Armenian writer friend, and she found him intelligent and smokin’ hot. Odie is perfectly fluent in English, but connotation can still trip her up. A while back, I told her that when Americans think someone is nice-looking, they say, “smokin’ hot.” Albert’s twenty-two-year-old son seated next to me whispers, “She thinks he’s smoking hot?” I whisper back, “She also thinks you and I are smoking hot. It’s her phrase.” Albert, on the other side of me, whispers, “You are smoking pot?” Patrick, across from me, listening through the din, says, “No, I don’t like smoking pot.” Armen, a little hard of hearing, says to Patrick, “You like smoking pot?!” Albert whispers to me, “Pot is not so bad. I like Scotch better.” Odie, oblivious to their side conversations, finishes her recounting with a flourish: “And he’s such a good writer!

But the most dramatic change in Turkey was the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Assyrians, and 353,000 Pontic Greeks, and the cruel death marches to exile of 1.5 million more Greeks of Turkey; death marches on which countless other Pontians lost their lives, all between 1915 and 1923. This genocide, euphemistically termed “ethnic cleansing,” and “relocation,” eliminated most, if not all, of the Christian minorities in Turkey, and brought to a tragic end the 3,000 year history of the Pontic Greeks in Asia Minor.