Diana Abu-Jaber Quotes

#1. He tells about his Sudanese roommate at Georgetown who owned a prayer rug with a compass to find Mecca built right into it. "After a few weeks in America, he rolled it up and used the compass to go camping," Han says.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#2. Sometimes when she lies awake her body feels as finely made as a tuning fork. She can hear and smell the most delicate things, the smell and music of thought itself.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#3. I'm in my junior year but I can't take it anymore. The beige walls, the scent of linoleum and used lockers, the shrill bell between classes. High school is sucking the life out of me.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#4. Old, like swallowed tears.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#5. Phantasm, a pink-palmed jinn, a ghost from one of the drowned cities.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#6. The sky is white.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#7. When Matussem Ramoud opened his eyes each morning, his wife would still not be there.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#8. He believes that this man has looped a bit of the thread-leash through a corner of his soul.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#9. The streets of Aqaba are shell spirals and, on summer nights, crowded and complicated as a woman's heart.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#10. It's a big formless, arctic night, the stars so bright they seem to hiss. I walk with my hands in pockets, arms pressed to my sides. Even in my down parka, the cold is still there. I feel as though my blood is crackling in it, my bones conducting cold like wires. My toes are curled in their boots.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#11. Love and prayer are intimately related.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#12. You should prize this pain of yours. This is what will make you human all the way through. Nothing less will do that.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#13. Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [ ... ] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#14. If you silence yourself, if you try to be good, if you try to be polite, or toe a party line, you end up paying for that in the long run. You pay for it ... with your homeland, or with your soul, or with your artistic vision.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#15. There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#16. Cold, like swallowed tears.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#17. But my foster mother never explained to me that there can be a deep loneliness in modern sanity too. That madness can be its own form of solace.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#18. You want to protect you children, don't you? You let them out of your body but you never let them all the way out.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#19. People look at you and forget about things.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#20. Tasting a piece of bread that someone bought is like looking at that person, but tasting a piece of bread that they baked is like looking out of their eyes.

Diana Abu-Jaber

#21. His expression seems a sort of surrender: the loss of a thing that he has already lost before.

Diana Abu-Jaber