Samina Najmi > Quotes

“Sometimes at Fresno State I teach Sandra Cisneros's story "Eleven," in which the child narrator says that when you're eleven, you're also ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one years old, like the layers of an onion or a doll inside a doll. I think when we live inside one home, we are also living in all the other homes we have ever inhabited. We live among those smells, those surfaces, those different dawns; we breathe the air of those homes populated by faces we will never see again.”
― Samina Najmi, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time

“Then as now, I believed that when we’re uncertain of the road ahead, the wisest course is to trace our steps back home, however we define it, and stay until we find our bearings again.”
― Samina Najmi, Sing Me a Circle