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DNF

Always save 10% of yourself so you'll have something to fall back on

"Its hard to see the beauty in things when you can't see past your insecurities."

"Habibi, always look beyond what your eyes initially recognize and find out what is real, what is possible, and what is the truth."

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

Wondering how someone who filled up a room could fit into a box so small.

“If we are lost, God is like water, finding the unknowable path when we cannot.”

Older boys lingered around them, and Thula would sometimes converse and smile, but she did not put down her books. It was as if she was trying to send a message to the boys: If you want to get to me, you must prove yourself worthy of my putting down my book for you.

I was confident that waiting for this man would be worthwhile. And he was worthwhile, my husband, my dream, who with a semi-smile brought low the clouds and laid them for me to walk on, who with a single touch left me floating face downward on the stillest, cleanest water.

A man's anger is often no more than a safe haven for his cowardice.

He is learning, just as we're unlearning, that sometimes the best way forward is to do as commanded and offer no resistance.

His father must have shown him how to pick up scraps; soon he'll teach his son how to do the same - smile, nod, take whatever they give you, thank them profusely, ask no questions, let them know they own the air you breathe.

She might be the closest I'll have to having a daughter in a while. That is why I want, desperately, as impossible as it seems, for her to grow up to be an unshackled woman, so that I may tell my brother when we meet again, that though I'd failed at saving him from whoever felled him, I hadn't failed in keeping his children safe by doing everything I could so they could grow up in a clean Kosowa.

We wondered if America was populated with cheerful people like that overseer, which made it hard for us to understand them: How could they be happy when we were dying for their sake? Why wouldn't they ask their friends at Pexton to stop killing us? Was it possible they knew nothing of our plight? Was Pexton lying to them, just as they were lying to us?

I convinced myself that my silence meant I was a good wife. But the biggest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves. I bit my tongue because I did not want to ask questions. I did not ask questions because I did not want to know the answers. It was convenient to believe my husband was trustworthy; sometimes faith is easier than doubt.

Before I got married, I believed love could do anything. I learned soon enough that it couldn't bear the weight of four years w/o children. If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it's in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn't mean it's no longer love.

when will this get good?

I clung because I needed the contact, the verification that I was more than loosely bound mud. I needed to feel the heartbeat of another thumping against my skin, the rise and fall of their breathing, the illusion that I was not terribly, terribly alone.

I would make my decision based on their voices. Nothing more. Not looks or height or body, not beautiful hands or trimmed toenails peeking out from open-toed sandals. Pausing around the corner, I would wait for the man to speak, and then I'd make my judgment. Call it a gut reaction. I stuck with it.