“Love and prayer are intimately related.”

“He tells about his Sudanese roommate at Georgetown who owned a prayer rug with a compass to find Mecca built right into it. "After a few weeks in America, he rolled it up and used the compass to go camping," Han says.”

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground”

“She wonders sometimes if it's a sort of flaw or lack in her - the inability to lose herself in someone else. . . . she's never quite understood how people could trade in quiet spaces and solitary gardens and courtyards, thoughtful walks and the delicious rhythms of work, for the fearful tumult of falling in love.”

“His expression seems a sort of surrender: the loss of a thing that he has already lost before.”

“The sky is white.”

“When Matussem Ramoud opened his eyes each morning, his wife would still not be there. ”