Latifa almuhanna

“When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change. Your descriptions of the desert—that oceanic, endless glare—are terrible but also very beautiful. Maybe there's something to be said for the rawness and emptiness of it all. The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn. But when I think of you, it's as if you've gone away to sea on a ship—out in a foreign brightness where there are no paths, only stars and sky.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Over and over in the play my character says, "I'm thirty-two years old," as if that should explain everything that's wrong in her life. I don't know what it's like to be thirty-two, but I can imagine. I imagine she means she's stuck in an in-between time, she's at an age that isn't a milestone but more of a no-man's-land, an age where she's feeling like her hopes are fading.”
― Lauren Graham, Someday, Someday, Maybe

“We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“...and yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch