Ayse

“Only you can know if you’re doing this to escape what happened to your parents, but I can tell you this, as someone who wishes only good things for you: trying not to repeat someone else’s history is a wasteful way to live.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“You’d walk in and be confronted immediately with the feeling that all the furniture was living in denial of its geographic circumstance, that the human who had done the arrangements was afraid of the city outside her windows.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“To wake up from a dream you have been dreaming since birth is powerful. But to wake up from a dream you have been dreaming from birth with almost a hundred million people, brothers and strangers alike, a collective nightmare, a nightmare we had been imbibing all our lives and passing around to one another, feeding innocently to our newborns—that we are worthless, that we deserve no better than the filth we live in …”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“The continuity of these traditions helped bridge the spaces between dislocation and the home I had forged in my birthright homeland, but I knew I could never again be complete in one place. This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere. To remain in one place meant tearing one’s limbs from another. I missed my mother. My brother and grandmother. I balled a bite of mansaf in my hand and looked around the room.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World