Tunisian Love Quotes

If the full moon loves you, why worry about the stars?

Even now - they'll never grow up - Japanese potters still play with accidents. Whether it arises from the clay, the wheel, the kiln or the glaze, they watch out for any irregularity and sometimes even emphasize it. In any case they use it as a starting point for a new adventure. The shape and colour may be perfectly classical, but spoiled by a scratch or being under- or over-fired. So they pursue and develop the flaw, struggling fiercely, lovingly with and against it until it becomes deliberate, an expression of themselves. If they succeed they're overjoyed: the result is modern. Never Tunisian. But not many Swiss bankers take up with Japanese potters.

Here is my translation. I don’t get to use my German often these days. It’s not perfect,” she said. “Thank you.” He opened it out, smoothing the folds on the garden table. The letter was addressed to “My Dearest Mary.” Alex read it aloud. It was a love letter of sorts and chronicled the gradual disillusionment of a young German officer fighting a war he no longer believed in. Hans Otto told his young bride of the treatment of Tunisian Jews by the Nazi occupiers, his own feelings of shame and impotence. He explained his loss of faith in the Fatherland that his family long served. Then came the approach in early 1943 by an agent of British Intelligence and his decision to betray his country, defecting with the plane carrying the secret archive.

As I pull out of the driveway, I see him step behind my car and splash a glass of water onto the rear windshield. It’s an old Tunisian tradition he’s done countless times before: to throw water behind a loved one as they venture out on a long trip, a blessing to ensure their safe return.

He threw Scholscher a challenging glance. The major was thinking of the motives that could drive a man like Haas to live alone for twenty-five years among the elephants of Lake Chad. It was again that spark of misanthropy which most people carry in them, a presentiment of some different and better company than their own kind, a spark that sometimes blazes up and takes astonishing, unpredictable and explosive forms. He thought also of the old Chinese who never move without their pet grasshoppers, of the Tunisians who take their caged birds to the cafe with them, and of Colonel Babcock who spent hours with his eyes fixed on a jumping bean, which kept him company. He was slightly astonished to hear that Haas believed in God — there seemed to be a contradiction there; it’s true, he thought, taking a pull at his pipe, that God hasn’t got a cold muzzle a man can touch when he feels lonely, that one can’t stroke Him behind the ears, that He doesn’t wag His tail at the sight of you every morning, and that you cannot catch sight of Him trotting over the hills with His ears flapping and His trunk in the air. One can’t even hold Him in one’s hand like a nice warm pipe, and since a spell on earth after all lasts fifty or sixty years, it’s perfectly understandable that people should end by buying themselves a pipe or a jumping bean.

Ezra remembered the first time he heard Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” On a frantic high, he named his new Doberman pinscher puppy Tunisia (RIP). He ate at a local Tunisian restaurant exclusively for six months. He was ready to drop everything and relocate to Tunisia. That was the transcendent power of a song! The really good ones could rearrange the topography of your soul. It was what drove a musician’s sublime hunger.

In World War 1, he had survived thirty months at the front; he rescued the wounded-- it was his job-- under heavy bombardment. A witness remembered his "rough-hewn face that Greco had prefigured" and his "total lack of ecclesiasticism." One of the officers serving with him wrote, "Two features of his personality struck you immediately: "courage and humility"." His regiment's Tunisian sharpshooters, who were Muslims, used to say rather cryptically that a "spiritual structure" protected him when he plucked bodies from the ground in crossfire. In battle, he rejoiced in his anonymity and in the front's exhilaration. Precious few men left the Battle of Ypres with a beating heart, let alone a full stomach, let alone exhilaration: "Nobody except those who were there will ever have the wonder-laden memory that a man can retain of the plain of Ypres in April 1915, when the air of Flanders stank of chlorine and the shells were tearing down the poplars along l'Yperle Canal-- or again, of the charred hillsides of Souville, in July 1916, when they held the odor of death... Those more than human hours impregnate life with a clinging, ineradicable flavor of exaltation and initiation, as though they had been transferred into the absolute." The "clinging, ineradicable flavor"* was perhaps mud-- the mud of Ypres in which two hundred thousand British and Commonwealth men died, ninety thousands of them lost in the actual mud. Action he loved. His ever increasing belief that God calls people to build and divinize the world, to aid God in redemption, charged every living moment with meaning-- precisely why the battlefield gripped him. "The man at the front is... only secondarily his own self. First and foremost, he is part of a prow cleaving the waves." He dared title an essay "Nostalgia for the Front": "All the enchantments of the East, all the spiritual warmth of Paris, are not worth the mud of Douaumont... How heart-rending it is to find oneself so seldom with a task to be accomplished, one to which the soul feels that it can commit itself unreservedly!" When he entered the war, he was already a priest. One dawn in 1918, camped in a forest in the Oise with his Zouave regiment, he had neither bread nor wine to offer at Mass. He had an idea, however, and he wrote it down. Five years later, he sat on a camp stool inside a tent by the Ordos desert cliffs west of Peking. He reworked his old wartime idea on paper. What God's priests, if empty-handed, might consecrate at sunrise each day is that one day's development: all that the evolving world will gain and produce, and all it will lose in exhaustion and suffering. These the priest could raise and offer. In China again, four years later, he rode a pony north in the Mongolian grasslands and traced Quaternary strata. Every day still he said to himself what he now called his Mass upon the altar of the world, "to divinize the new day": "Since once more, my Lord, not now in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia, I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil and sorrow of the world.