Amal Quotes

The short answer: no. The longer answer: I don't think so? ~ Amal El-Mohtar

I wish sometimes I could be less fierce with you. No- I feel sometimes like I ought to want to be less fierce with you. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Hunger, Red - to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth - is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that's what I have instead of friends. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Amal, you look stunned," said Mrs. Melchor. "Have you been struck by lightning between classes?"
"Yes," she said. "The lightning of ignorance."
Mrs. Melchor raised her eyebrows. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

You are yourself, and so remain, as I remain. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

the eye does not see, what the mind does not know. ~ Amal Mattu

But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.

I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Perhaps survival is its own form of torture. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

She has won, which is not an unfamiliar feeling. She is happy, which is. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Coleridge wrote a poem called 'The Eolian Harp,' in which he explored the notion of music slumbering on its instrument. It's a gorgeous poem! It moves through thoughts and moods of the soul as if we're all but harps waiting for a breeze to pass through us to animate us. I feel the same way about art: that it is something that on many levels colonises you, gets inside you and changes you from the inside out. I find that happens with books, too. After I've read a book, for a couple of days afterwards I think in the patterns of the book's writing, because the act of reading is an act of organising your own thought process. If you are reading someone else's writing, you are having to organise your perception along someone else's structure. So if I read a book by Terry Pratchett, a few days later there is still a little Terry Pratchettness to my thoughts. When I read something by Catherynne Valente, for quite a few days there is a kind of 'jewelled' quality to my thoughts. To read a book is to let someone else reach inside me and reorganise me. As a writer, I find it very difficult to start writing immediately after having read another writer's book. I have to digest it first, and let the influence pass… ~ Amal El-Mohtar

I keep turning away from speaking of your letter. I feel--to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the deapths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up - and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

There were some problems only coffee and ice cream could fix. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so. Letters of only one word. Letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair. Letters that will bite you. Letters that will mark you. I'll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp. I'll write you by shark's tooth and scallop shell. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious - I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they'll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we've shaped together. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

. . . may causality forbid Commandant ever dispatch me to one of your viny-hivey elfworlds, profusely floral, all arcing elder trees, neural pollen, bees gathering memories from eyes and tongue, honey libraries dripping knowledge from the comb. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

We have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where we are ourselves the only constants linking yesterday to tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don't want to imply that there is by saying how much this shocked me
just that it felt so suddenly, painfully right to think that I have tapped into my Long Tale, that I have set my feet on the path I want to walk the rest of my life, and that it is a path of stories and writing and that no matter how many oceans I cross or how transient I feel in any given place, I am still on my Tale's Road, because having tapped it, having found it, the following is inevitable ... ~ Amal El-Mohtar

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. ~ Susan Abulhawa

Myth and legend give way to history, which gives way again to myth, like curtains parting and meeting again on either side of a performance. xxx All good stories travel from the outside in. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

I wonder what of me there is in you. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

I've met my bride-to-be in Italy and I will be married in Italy soon, in a couple of weeks. In Venice of all places! In closing, I guess what I would like to say is to my bride-to-be, Amal, that I love you very much and I can't wait to be your husband. ~ George Clooney

PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Once,a boy told a girl : i will stay with you forever, little did she know that his forever is only three months because..he died of cancer! ~ Amal Sagheer

It's amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You're different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Like your victory, love spreads back through time. It claims our earliest association, our battles and losses. Assassinations become assignations. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

It's not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It's that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it's as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Your perception is riveting, Amal," he says in a bored and sarcastic tone, dropping the note down on my desk. "It's comforting to know that there are people in my class who have the maturity and intelligence to make derogatory comments about other people's external appearances."
Now what am I supposed to say to that?
"What do you have to say for yourself?"
Friggin' mind reader. ~ Randa Abdel-Fattah

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. ~ Susan Abulhawa

This is not even one of the weirder Atlantises. No crystals here, no flying cars, no perfect governments, no psychic powers. (Those last two things don't exist, anyway.) ~ Amal El-Mohtar

There's a kind of time travel in letters, isn't there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never - and I have to write the rest of this not knowing. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

This is a collection of dexterous, loving, beautifully optimistic work that left me breathless and delighted ... Hannu Rajaniemi's magnificent science fiction - as is paradoxically appropriate - is pure magic. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

My love, can't you see
how much i love thee
For i through your eyes
shall see
Our great love
for all eternity ~ Amal Sagheer

You must dwell, says Garden, within time to shift it in lasting ways; play a slow game, but win. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Funny how we always think of knights as fighting dragons, when in fact they work for them. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

They would make this war, she thinks, if there were not a war already made for them to make. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

I don't give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency, towards whose shift the arc of the universe bends. But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

just how layered and complex plain speech could be, how many secrets wrapped in the banner of Sincerity ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Yet I have learned.
In chronicles of sorrow, too, there are joys,
In lesions of silence, immeasurable noise.
And certainly in the very pit of the heart
Beneath the trouble in the valves
There is kindness.
Certainly in the ruby heart of this plum's seasons,
A silent reason for hope. ~ Amal Khan

The future harvests us. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Amal: It isn't sad. When they shut me in here first I felt the day was so long. Since the King's Post Office I like it more and more being indoors, and as I think I shall get a letter one day, I feel quite happy and then I don't mind being quiet and alone. I wonder if I shall make out what'll be in the King's letter?
Gaffer: Even if you didn't wouldn't it be enough if it just bore your name? ~ Rabindranath Tagore

What do you want from this, Red? What are you doing here?

Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

There is no mono-we; there are many usses. The usses change and interleave. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

I'm too lazy to go find happiness,but i'm sure it will swing by sometime ~ Amal Sagheer

Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. ~ Amal El-Mohtar