Marija

“Perhaps he has the Kind One speak it for him first, before he tries it out on his own; smiling over the syllables, the sound like a sweet on his tongue, rhyming with the word of his soul; a discovery of not only his new name, but a guiding philosophy on life.
That this is how everyone should be named: a hand, thrown into a bag of words, in search of that singular and fitting shape.”
― Simon Jimenez, The Vanished Birds

“My name is a song I sing myself to remind me of my mothers voice. My name does not bend to your tongue, does not stop at your borders. My name is not a flight risk. I sing my name to remind me of a time where our language was in our blood. A time when our mothers were in our hair, a time when vowels came from the same deep place as laughter, and the pit of thirst was not so wide. Oh beloved, I walk the gauntlet of life barefoot and bound, clawing at the hills for the voice I left at the house where my mother and her own were born. I gather words like stones to feed my children, they thirst for words that sound like the shape of their eyes. Where oh beloved, where will I find such words?”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Maybe it's true that we become what we love most, that we exalt the nameless by losing ourselves in it.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“This is a love story to its blade-dented bone.”
― Simon Jimenez, The Spear Cuts Through Water