“How fate is stubborn and holds to habit.”

“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?”

“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”

“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.”

“Love cannot reconcile with deception”

“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.”