Jane Ross

“Easier, she thinks, to remember nothing, to enter a world already changed, than have it transform before your eyes. In the palaces, the grandparents must sit in their extravagant rooms, remembering sand.”
― Hala Alyan, Salt Houses

“How tiny our lives are, he thinks, swelling to impossible size with love, then shrinking again. He puts an arm around his daughter and pulls her close, this girl he will lose eventually to something. She settles against him. For long moments, they sit together in the dark, watching the”
― Hala Alyan, Salt Houses

“You’ve been emotionally code-switching all your life,” Seham likes to say, and while Manar used to protest, lately she has been accepting it, reveling”
― Hala Alyan, Salt Houses

“America wasn’t like that. You became what you coveted. Memories were short. She met Mexicans, Germans, Libyans, who spoke accented English but responded, From here, whenever asked. Souad became brown. People’s eyes glazed over when she tried to explain that, yes, she’d lived in Kuwait, but no, she wasn’t Kuwaiti, and no, she had never been to Palestine, but yes, she was Palestinian. That kind of circuitous logic had no place over there.”
― Hala Alyan, Salt Houses