More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Water remembers. It is humans who forget.
“Well, this world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through.
Some people learn love, kindness. Others, I’m afraid, abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.”
“Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire—because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind—when people hate those they have hurt.”
Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.
Dr. Zaleekhah Clarke does not wish to live. She wants to excuse herself from a world where she often feels like an outsider, a confused and clumsy latecomer, an accidental guest who walked in through the wrong door at the wrong time.
The divisions that make up class are, in truth, the borders on a map. When you are born into wealth and privilege, you inherit a plan that outlines the paths ahead, indicating the shortcuts and byways available to reach your destination, informing you of the lush valleys where you may rest and the tricky terrain to avoid. If you enter the world without such a map, you are bereft of proper guidance. You lose your way more easily, trying to pass through what you thought were orchards and gardens, only to discover they are marshland and peat bogs.
It is perhaps easier to justify the end of a relationship—both to yourself and to others—when there is a definite, tangible cause, no matter how painful. But it is harder to grasp the gradual evaporation of love, a loss so slow and subtle as to be barely detectable, until it is fully gone.
“What happens after catastrophes? Those who survive nurse their broken hearts and start all over again, as one always does, as one always must.”
“You
may struggle to believe me. Remember, though, what defies comprehension isn’t the mysteries of the world, but the cruelties that humans are capable of inflicting upon each other.”
Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward, and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past. Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness. That is why minorities do not live in clock-time. They live in story-time.
“When someone gives you the food they’ve prepared, they give you their heart.”
Home is where your loved ones are, but the reverse is also true. Those you love are your sanctuary, your shelter, your country and even, when it comes to that, your exile. Wherever they go, you will follow.
“Why are women left out of history? Why do we have to piece their stories back together from fragments—like broken shards of pottery?”
He firmly believes he is here to help excavate and preserve antiquities that will surely be better off in the hands of Europeans rather than the natives. He
nor is there absolute silence, for silence, too, converses in its own language and dialect. Milk purrs while it churns into butter; mountains rumble as they crumble; mother goats recognize the bleats of their offspring long after weaning; wolves howl to find their way back home;
claim they are apostate Jews, or an odd Zoroastrian sect lost in the folds
“In Ancient Sumerian, ki-ang was ‘to love’—strangely, the word meant ‘to measure the earth.’ Love was not a feeling or an emotion as much as an anchor that rooted you to a place. All these years I have never yet found myself compelled to measure the earth.
