quietreader

“This is the land of your father, and his father before him. Your history is embedded in this soil. No country in the world will love you as yours does.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

“Bury me before I bury you" I did.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

“A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“We don't have to stop living because we might die.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow