Quotes by Susan Abulhawa

Were all born with the greatest treasures well ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart.

the reverse side of love is unbearable loss.

I loved her in spite of myself. I loved her immeasurably.Infinitely. And I feared that love as much as I feared my own fury at theworld.

She loved beyond measure, When I was young I thought her cold. But in time I came to understand that she was too tender for the world she’d been born into,” I said. Sorrow gave Dalia an iron gift. Behind that hard shelter, sheloved boundlessly in the distance and privacy of her solitude, safe fromthe tragic rains of her fate.

How fate is stubborn and holds to habit.

Thank you,’ I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. “May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift”; “Beauty is in the eyes that find me pretty”; “May Allah never deny your prayer”; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere “thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful.” (169).

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

Always is a good word to believe in.

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

Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.

Amal,I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow, parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell.

I feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power.

Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand.

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 childrens loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity...On September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your fathers 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.

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?

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

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

Under the broken promises of superpowers and under the worlds indifference to spilled Arab blood.