Maryam

“If she did ask, I would say it was grief. The deepest grief. I know she would accept that as an answer. No one knows what’s inside grief. Anything at all can be there.”
― Mona Awad, Rouge

“The poets did at least put it into words for you and ease the pain of it.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“That I can’t protect you from my terrible places that I still go, can’t help but go because no one protected me, no one saved me, no one ever held out their hand and walked me away. But I’m trying to save you, Sunshine. I’m trying in my broken way.”
― Mona Awad, Rouge

“To this day I vividly remember the smell and taste of everything we had. Soup first, the first delicious hot mouthful for almost twenty-four hours … it was crème d'asperge, and it came smocking-hot in brown earthenware bowls with handles like gnomes’ ears, and asparagus-tips bobbed and steamed on the creamy surface. With the soup came butter with the dew on it, and crusty rolls so new that where they lay on the plastic table-top there was a tiny dull patch of steam.

Phillippe revived to that soup as a fern revives to water. When his omelette arrived, a fluffy roll, crisped at the edges, from which mushrooms burst and spilled in their own rich gravy, he tackled it with an almost normal small-boys’ appetite. My own brand of weariness demanded something more solid and I had a stake. It came in a lordly dish with the butter still sizzling on its surface and the juices oozing pinky-brown through the mushrooms and tomatoes and tiny kidneys and the small mountain of crisply-fried onions … if filet mignon can be translated as darling steak this was the very sweetheart of its kind. By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan single-handed.”
― Mary Stewart, NINE COACHES WAITING