Zeyn Joukhadar Quotes

New York?" Itto looks down at me. "You may be American, but you are still Syrian."
I rub the camel's coarse hair with my palms. "How?"
"A person ca be two things at the same time," Itto says. "The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood.

I know God heard them both the same at the end, that he loved them both equally even though their prayers were different.

My whole life, Mama and Baba celebrated two religions' worth of holidays - Christmas, Eid al-Fitr, Easter. It used to make me wonder whether the most important things we see in God are really in each other.

But safety is not about never having bad things happen to you. It's about knowing that the bad things can't separate us from each other.

There is a goodness in the world that got me through, that taught me it's important to know who you are.

I ask, 'Do you think there's a place in the world where nobody has ever put their feet?'

'I think there are more of them than the other way around,' Mama says.

But once you've heard too many voices, you start to forget which one is your own

But as long as you're alive,' she says, 'you have a voice. You're the one who has to hear it.

You are the stories you tell yourself.

Every place you go becomes a part of you. But none more so than home.

Don't forget,' he says, and Abu Sayeed looks up while he translates, holding the words back a little, 'stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It's living that hurts us.

In the pockets of my heart without any words, I want to believe.

Like most people, the name history gave them isn't what they call themselves.