Melissa E.

“Nostalgia is an affliction. Life a fever or a cancer, the longing for what had vanished wasting a person away. Not just the unbearable losses, but the small things as well.”
― Hala Alyan, Salt Houses

“Your atom, I think it will never go back to peace, to cereal or rocks or anything like that. Once it has been seduced there is no way back, the way is always ahead, and it is so much harder after the passage from innocence. But it does not work to pretend to be innocent anymore. That seduced atom has energies that seduce people, and those rarely get lost.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“I was born a few months before the Nakba. You know this. You know what it means? It means it was already my reality. I didn’t know what it was before.”
― Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost

“And life, life has swept her along like a tiny seashell onto sand, has washed over her and now, suddenly, she is old. Her mother is dead. There is no one to ask the questions she needs to ask.”
― Hala Alyan, Salt Houses