More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Once upon a memory, at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea, there lay an island so beautiful and blue that the many travellers, pilgrims, crusaders and merchants who fell in love with it either wanted never to leave or tried to tow it with hemp ropes all the way back to their own countries.
legends are there to tell us what history has forgotten.
A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference.
Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.
but what chance does a bland apple have next to a luscious fig that still today, aeons after the original sin, tastes like lost paradise?
But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.
The places where we were born are the shape of our lives, even when we are away from them. Especially then.
May you never be able to forget. May you go to your grave still remembering.
As you aged you cared less and less about what others thought of you, and only then could you be more free.
At night I slept the untroubled sleep of those who have never had a reason to doubt that tomorrow would be better than yesterday.
Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.
Where do you start someone’s story when every life has more than one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning, nor is death exactly an end?
An uncivilized end for a woman who didn’t want to be part of civilization.’
‘One must have breakfast like a sultan, lunch like a vizier, dinner like a mendicant.
For it is a land without borders, a lover’s body.
If they only knew they have rainbows under their feet.
I can’t help harking back to my days in the sun.
Perhaps what they said about happiness was true, after all: it was contagious.
And I want you to understand a fundamental rule about love. You see, there are two kinds: the surface and the deep water.
At the end of the day, we all remember for the same reason we try to forget: to survive in a world that neither understands nor values us.
he would marvel at his mother’s fear of this world so full of wonders.
‘Because the past is a dark, distorted mirror. You look at it, you only see your own pain. There is no room in there for someone else’s pain.’
You know what they say, keep the tongue in your mouth a prisoner.
Wisdom consists of ten parts: nine parts of silence, one part of words.’
eat according to your own taste, dress according to others’.’
While religions clash to have the final say, and nationalisms teach a sense of superiority and exclusiveness, superstitions on either side of the border coexist in rare harmony.
You and Mum moved to this country, but we’re still migrating.’
It was the age-old question: whether to leave or to stay.
You don’t fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet there they were, the two of them.
Superstitions are the shadows of fears unknown.
‘When Westerners run away like that it means those of us they leave behind are in deep shit.’
I’ve been thinking that you are my country.
like all immigrants, I carry with me the shadow of another land?
But you know what they say, the bear knows seven songs and they are all about honey.’
knowing that bridges appear in our lives only when we are ready to cross them.
when all was said and done, what was left of an entire life, a human being
You don’t share a language, you think, and then you realize, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts.’
A close observer of the marvels of nature and the errors of the human race.’
What we think is impossible changes with every generation.’
Women mourn, men replace.’
If ever there was a centre to this world, it had to be here.
‘I’ll come with you anywhere,’ he said.
Maybe we give other names to grief because we are too scared to call it by its name.’
I think the Hittites brought you to this island sometime around the late Bronze Age and they forgot to take you back.
this generational migration, where what mattered was not the final destination but to be on the move, searching, changing, becoming.
Everywhere we go, it’ll follow us, this city, this island.’
Some day this pain will be useful to you.
If you find my husband, please bury him next to me.
In the most surprising ways, the victims continued to live, because that is what nature did to death, it transformed abrupt endings into a thousand new beginnings.
Then again, if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.
