“Under the broken promises of superpowers and under the worlds indifference to spilled Arab blood.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“Would words shatter the immensity of life and death so close to one another?”
— Susan Abulhawa
“The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“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?”
— Susan Abulhawa
“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.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“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.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“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.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“Always” is a good word to believe in.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“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).”
— Susan Abulhawa
“How fate is stubborn and holds to habit.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“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.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“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.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“the reverse side of love is unbearable loss.”
— Susan Abulhawa
“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.”
— Susan Abulhawa