“Some families ran their own little version of the Middle East.”
“Marriage is like the Middle East, isn't it? There's no solution.”
“Never been there, the Middle East," Qatar said vaguely.”
“The Middle East was not a wilderness, and the people there were not savages: if anything they were over civilized. Too many American newcomers to the East saw it in frontier terms.”
“It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.”
“In some ways, it's easier to settle for someone else's version of success than to risk falling short at one's own.”