“..cold, like swallowed tears.”

“The loneliness of the arab is a terrible thing; it is all consuming. It is already present like a little shadow under the heart when he lays his head on his mother's lap; it threatens to swallow him whole when he leaves his own country, even though he marries and travels and talks to friends twenty-four hours a day. That is the way Sirine suspects that Arabs feel everything - larger than life, feelings walking in the sky.”

“...tasting a piece of bread that someone bought is like looking at that person, but tasting a piece of bread that they baked is like looking out of their eyes.”

“Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.”

“There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier.”

“Marry, don't marry,' Auntie Aya says as we unfold layers of dough to make an apple strudel. Just don't have your babies unless it's absolutely necessary.'How do I know if it's necessary?'She stops and stares ahead, her hands gloved in flour. 'Ask yourself, Do I want a baby or do I want to make a cake? The answer will come to you like bells ringing.' She flickers her fingers in the air by her ear. 'For me, almost always, the answer was cake.”

“Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him.”