Susan Abulhawa Quotes

No one spoke much, as if to speak was to affirm reality. To remain silent was to accommodate the possibility that it all was merely a nightmare. The silence reached up to the cathedral ceiling and cluttered there, echoing sadness an unseen mayhem, as if too many souls were rising at once. We were existing somewhere between life and death, with neithe accepting us fully.

How fate is stubborn and holds to habit.

Still,
the refugee camp of Jenin remained as it had been, a one-square-mile
patch of earth, excised from time and imprisoned in that endless year
of 1948

It is the kind of love you can know only if you have felt the intense
hunger that makes your body eat itself at night. The kind you know
only after life shields you from falling bombs or bullets passing through
your body. It is the love that dives naked toward infinity's reach. I think
it is where God lives.

Praise be to Him who brings our loved ones home from el ghurba (exile)

Amal,I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow, parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell.

Under the broken promises of superpowers and under the worlds indifference to spilled Arab blood.

The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has come
to live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoiding
you, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that
Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones
weep. And the way we love is no exception

I loved her in spite of myself. I loved her immeasurably.
Infinitely. And I feared that love as much as I feared my own fury at the
world.

We stood crying, Huda with tears, I with my mother's silence and taut jaw. We were enfolded in each other like the last word of an epic poem we had never imagined would end. A childhood story we had lived together line by line, hand in hand, was ending and we knew it would close the moment we unraveled our arms.

When I was a child, Haj Salem told me that answers can be found
in the sky if you look long and hard enough.

No matter who you are, no matter what greatness you've achieved in your life or what gifts you've given to the rest of humanity, if you criticize Israel, you must expect to become persona non grata. You should expect an utter onslaught of attacks ...

You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion.

Our wants were simple, but they could not have been more complicated.

I feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power.

They uprooted indigenous songs, and planted lies in the ground to grow a new story.

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon's army
circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and
Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up
checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese
Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops,
watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky
with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to
shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western
journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it
in Pity the Nation:
They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the
back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry
and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a
hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every
alleyway, there were corpses - women, young men, babies
and grandparents - lying together in lazy and terrible
profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to
death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more
bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had
disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave.
Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves.
Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such
savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the
top of the tower block to the wes

She loved beyond measure, When I was young I thought her cold. But in time I came to understand that she was too tender for the world she'd been born into, I said. Sorrow gave Dalia an iron gift. Behind that hard shelter, she
loved boundlessly in the distance and privacy of her solitude, safe from
the tragic rains of her fate.

Nima Shirazi is a rare voice of rational analysis and political insight that provides an eloquent counter to the pervasive absurdities that make up popular political discourse.

We were
existing somewhere between life and death, with neither accepting us
fully.

El-Khan to the villagers. Overlooking Beit Daras were the remnants

the reverse side of love is unbearable loss.

They had bombed and burned,killed and maimed,plundered and looted.Now they had come to claim the land.

How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors' toil, without mortal consequence?

Love is what we are about, my darling," she says. "Not even in death has our love faded, for I live in your veins.

Stories matter. We are composed of our stories. The human heart is made of the words we put in it. If someone ever says mean things to you, don't let those words go into your heart, and be careful not to put mean words in other people's hearts.

I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her.

Words and stories washed ashore on that ancient way of the sea, and we made of them new songs. The sun came again, casting shadows that we peeled off the street to make of them new clothes.

The land and everything on it can be taken away, but no one can take away your knowledge or the degrees you earn

Predicament crystallized with every passing year, the

Would words shatter the immensity of life and death so close to one another?

Our bond was Palestine. It was
a language we dismantled to construct a home.

As the people of Ein Hod were marched into despossession, Moshe and his comrades guarded and looted the newly emptied village. While Dalia lay heartbroken, delirious with the loss of Ismael, Jolanta rocked David to sleep. While Hasan tended to his family's survival, Moshe sang in drunken revelry with his fellow soldiers. And while Yehya and the others moved in anguished steps away from their land, the usurpers sand "Hatikva," and shouted, "Long live Israel!

Dr. Shammaa's story was a dreadful one and her voice
broke as she told it. "I had to take the babies and put them
in buckets of water to put out the flames," she said. "When
I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning.
Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours." Next
morning, Amal Shammaa took the tiny corpses out of the
mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into
flames.

I know in alone here. I'm not delusional. But the way memory animates the past is more real than the present.

A persistent breeze lifted the thin curtains, fluttering a few moments of tranquility into the turbulent day.

Always" is a good word to believe in.

Thank you,' I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. "May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift"; "Beauty is in the eyes that find me pretty"; "May Allah never deny your prayer"; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere "thank you" an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful." (169).

An instant can crush a brain and change the course of life, the course of history.

I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity ... On September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father's life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved.

For I'll keep my humanity, though I did not keep my promises.
... and Love shall not be wrested from my veins.

We're all born with the greatest treasures we'll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart.

At last everything was falling into place. Falling into love.

For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.

Love cannot reconcile with deception

She bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother, but the same beauty bloomed differently in each of them. My mother's fairness was exquisite and untouchable, roaming alone in an abandoned castle. Khalto Bahiyas' beauty took you in immediately. Hers was easy and disclosed hordes of laughter stolen from wherever it could be found. Gravity, sun, and time has scrawled on their faces the travails of hard work, childbirth, and destitution.

Though they lived with the indignities of dispossession and military
occupation, Huda sang with an unassailable freedom that comes only
to those with unwavering faith.