Quotes by Hannah Lillith Assadi

I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.

It was long past midnight. Lauras music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.

With this man I will never want. With this man I will never be sad again.

I remember wanting to flee her, and being unable to flee her, so in need of her and half hating her for it, and I still am nauseous from it.

I have forgiven Sonora. I have forgiven New York, forsaken the recursion of history. But I do not yet know how to forgive myself.

One day you look in the mirror and you see your parents sadness in your eyes.

I lit a cigarette. Go ahead, take a smoke, my father said. It wont kill you. Only sadness will.

We both knew no bounds to our escapism.

When you are rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it . . . Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend.

Find someone who loves you more than you love them.

Her father kneels and unclasps the urn. Above the waves she falls graceful as snow, my sister, my Sonora.

New York was always so beautiful in the very crux of parting with it.

My father insisted I eat red meat. Youll lose your brain without food, he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.

Look at the lonely fisherman, my father says.Look at his view, my mother says.

I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

For those I come from, there is nothing more devouring than the feeling of want for home, the feeling of need for home. We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer to carry us out of the too-dark night.

This is it. This is how I always saw heaven, always by the sea, always by night, always in the dark.

You and I, your mother, Ahlam, we are from up there, my father continued. We come from the stunning stars. We were just born in the wrong place. We were meant to live on another planet. The people who come to the desert are those who know this, deep inside of them, we are from up there. From far, far away.

I dont think Im from this galaxy at all. I believe I came from the Andromeda galaxy, not so far, but far enough. Maybe thats why Im an outcast. He drew the spiral of Andromeda close to the Milky Way, almost touching. Then he pointed to Andromeda in the night sky above us.Maybe thats where Im from too, my father said. We could still see the stars.

There is no moon. The stars have risen and fallen and given way to a new spread, to the smeared heart of our Milky Way.