Quotes by Ruth Ahmed

Ruby clapped her hands in glee and gave a comedic wiggle of her head, Bollywood style.I know the song now, can even sing it, but back then all I heard was the verdant Punjabi, the striking primary colours of the five rivers, the intricate history of a complex land.

I drank in his smell, Id missed him so much more than Id realised. Despite dreaming of him every night, besides my secret habit of writing Honour Hussain in curled scripts on every scrap piece of paper, I surprised myself by how much I needed him.

The evening that Al and I met became the night that we met. By the time we fell asleep at daybreak we were different people

I steadied by guitar against the table, and steadied myself with it.And forgot every rule I had ever known.

When I was a child I burnt the back of my right hand on a hot iron. I cant recall the pain, but theres an eye-shaped scar as testament to it. As a teenager I used to think it was the all seeing eye of the anti-Christ and that I was the devil incarnate. Or at least a minion. It was my right hand, innit?What I do remember though is my father, or Dad as we called him, abandoning the polite Abbu, telling me not to cry and to be patient because the fires of hell were seventy times hotter than the fire of the iron.

I wanted my eternity in carbon molecules, in being part of the trees, the sky, air itself

There is something so special in the early leaves drifting from the trees - as if we are all to be allowed a chance to peel, to refresh, to start again.

Honour, in her modern self-confidence, had grown up never having to face actual raw, passionate, drop-down-dead-hostility. She didnt really understand what was going to happen,

The sadness began later, in waves as crushing as the contractions had been,

Her English was sweet, an effort for her, anachronistic and unpractised.