Best 25 quotes of Susan Abulhawa on MyQuotes

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.

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

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?

For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.

How can one find the first moment of love? When, in what instant, does the night's dark sky become blue?

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.

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

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

I watch life trickle from the bullet wound of a sixteen-year-old "example" and marvel how things weak, even words, will turn vicious and merciless to gain power,despite reason or history

love is what we are about, my darling," she says. "Not even in death has our love faded, for I live in your veins.

Nima Shirazi is a rare voice of rational analysis and political insight that provides an eloquent counter to the pervasive absurdities that make up popular political discourse.

No matter who you are, no matter what greatness you've achieved in your life or what gifts you've given to the rest of humanity, if you criticize Israel, you must expect to become persona non grata. You should expect an utter onslaught of attacks.

the reverse side of love is unbearable loss.

The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has cometo live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoidingyou, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stonesweep. And the way we love is no exception

They had bombed and burned,killed and maimed,plundered and looted.Now they had come to claim the land.

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.

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

For us, fear comes where terror comes to others because we are anesthetized to the guns constantly pointed at us. And the terror we have known is something few Westerners ever will. Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme. [...] Our sadness can make the stones weep. And the way we love is no exception.

How fate is stubborn and holds to habit.

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 the world.

It's all about having a thread that links your years. To have another living person who just knows you. Someone who has seen you from childhood.

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, she loved boundlessly in the distance and privacy of her solitude, safe from the tragic rains of her fate.

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).

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

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