“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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”

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