aina

“Music is like spoken language, inextricable from its culture. If you don't learn a language early in life, its words will forever come out wrinkled and accented by another world, no matter how well you memorize or love the vocabulary, grammar, and cadences of a new language. This is why foreign "belly dancers" have always bothered me. The use of our music as a prop to wiggle and shimmy and jump around offends me. Eastern music is the soundtrack of me..”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“The cruel thing about grief is that it doesn’t care where you are or how you’re feeling. Out of nowhere, a random memory descends, even if your mind has been running a hundred miles an hour over the hundred things on your to-do list. The memory could be of the most mundane, ordinary day, and still, it’ll send an ancient sadness through you. The sort of sadness you imagine humans have felt since creation, but that you never imagined you could experience so deep inside.”
― Ruben Reyes Jr., There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: A Collection of Short Stories of Fantasy, Migration, and Central American Identity

“I colonized the colonizer’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“There is nothing more heartbreaking than a squandered opportunity, a missed chance. I knew about stuff like that. I'd been young once. So many dreams had been dashed. But I dashed them myself. I wanted to be safe, whole, have a future of certainty. One makes mistakes when there is confusion between having a future at all and having the future one wants.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands