“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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