Hannah Lillith Assadi Quotes

I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams.

The earth spins further from help. Beyond us the heart monitors go on, the fluorescent lights buzz, the commentators shout, the casino leaves fall into the desert, sirens blare. But all we hear is the rain.

This day has already happened; this day will not end.

I don't think I'm from this galaxy at all. I believe I came from the Andromeda galaxy, not so far, but far enough. Maybe that's why I'm an outcast.' He drew the spiral of Andromeda close to the Milky Way, almost touching. Then he pointed to Andromeda in the night sky above us.

'Maybe that's where I'm from too,' my father said. We could still see the stars.

This is it. This is how I always saw heaven, always by the sea, always by night, always in the dark.

With the years, we become even more ourselves and call this change.

My father insisted I eat red meat. 'You'll lose your brain without food,' he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.

I asked the boy who wept what it felt like, crystal meth, the prettiest name for a drug besides heroin. Crystal methamphetamine. His head fell back. He closed his eyes, then opened them. 'Come on, you know . . . you're just high as fuck.' Then in a dramatic whisper: 'Everything goes silent like a midnight of the mind.

He could guide anyone to the point of no return. He'd corral them with poetry, music, invoking the alcoholic gods that all died young. But we were so young, we didn't know we had anything we would miss.

I looked at Laura . . . and wondered at how many lives before this life we might have known together.

One day you look in the mirror and you see your parents' sadness in your eyes.

I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.

We both knew no bounds to our escapism.

My father, a Palestinian, and my mother, an Israeli, met in a bar in New York. Their encounter was a blue shift. An anomaly. A collision. In the end, I understand, it is only for this we live. All I ever wanted was to love.

For those I come from, there is nothing more devouring than the feeling of want for home, the feeling of need for home. We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer to carry us out of the too-dark night.

My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war.

When you are rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it . . . Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend.

There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.

The instruments were all half desired, half forgotten. It was as if they were left behind by a ghost right in the middle of playing.

We are all cursed. We live in the era of the curse. A world that cannot be fixed. The best thing would be an alien ship. Another planet. One with three moons. But you, I saw you in my dreams. I saw you coming. You came to heal my broken heart. That's why I named you Ahlam.

I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

New York was always so beautiful in the very crux of parting with it.

She crooned on until her cigarette was gone. The ash in the wind blew around us like hesitant snow.

Sometimes in the corner of my eye, I saw a girl running through the loft. A see-through girl, a silhouette. She looked the way the world looks without my glasses. Vaguely hued, indistinct. She looked the way a body looks underwater, lost in the blur of bubble and wave.

You and I, your mother, Ahlam, we are from up there,' my father continued. 'We come from the stunning stars. We were just born in the wrong place. We were meant to live on another planet. The people who come to the desert are those who know this, deep inside of them, we are from up there. From far, far away.

Don't fall in love or let anyone's life become more important than your own.

I slowly lost any dream for myself. No one warned me of this, that the stars in New York can infect the light inside, that they can trap you in their shadow. Dylan was of course a star. He had achieved the thing we all came to New York wanting.

My brain came alight with tenderness for her. I felt so sorry for everything. I yearned to embrace her, kiss her even, to stay with her, always her, my sister, my friend to the end. It was a story after all, even if a sick one. It was completely ours.