Susan Abulhawa

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

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

“The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys.”

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

“the reverse side of love is unbearable loss.”

“Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Always" is a good word to believe in.”

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

“Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?”

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

“How fate is stubborn and holds to habit.”

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

“Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“أيا كان شعورك , اكبتيه في داخلك”

“Love cannot reconcile with deception”

“We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her”

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

“I watch life trickle from the bullet wound of a sixteen-year-old "example" and marvel how things weak, even words, will turn vicious and merciless to gain power,despite reason or history”

“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!”

“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.”