More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
How could something so simple, for the sake of solace in a time like this, be a sin?
When God first began to brainstorm the world did He think to make branches a dark brown and flowers either white or soft pink, and only like that in the spring, so that you are always startled by their bloom? Or were God’s decisions scattered and sudden, beautiful by chance?
Our children are not our own as our lives are not our own. All are a loan from God, His temporary gift.
About how important it was for one to choose the right friends, that it was one’s friends who were the truest reflection of the self.
She could hold in her heart a belief in Islam as well as the unwavering belief that every human had the right to choose who they loved, and how, and that belief was in exact accordance with her faith: that it is the individual’s right to choose, and the individual’s duty to empathize with one another. Didn’t the Quran itself contain the verse, We have created you from many tribes, so that you may know one another.
Intentions shrank next to actions. Actions took on their own momentum.
“We will wait until you are allowed in,” Baba said, as if to himself. “I will wait.” Baba pointed at the sky, and Amar looked, past the stars and past the lighter patch of the Milky Way, past the moon, and maybe God was there and maybe God wasn’t, but when Baba said to him, “I don’t think He created us just to leave some of us behind,” Amar believed him. Amar wanted to.
Maybe it was the exceptions we made for one another that brought God more pride than when we stood firm, maybe His heart opened when His creations opened their hearts to one another, and maybe that is why the boy was switched with the ram: so a father would not have to choose between his boy and his belief. There was another way. Amar was sure of it. He wanted them to find it together.
The older I get, the easier it is for me to imagine that God can forgive a man for his sins when they only affect him, but maybe He wants people to mend any hurt and harm they cause their fellow brothers and sisters while in this life, while living in this realm.
If we, just humans and entirely limited in our thinking, could think to break resources into smaller pieces so our children could feel the joy of scattering slices a little longer, then what generosity was our creator not capable of?
I panicked, not knowing what my children were capable of, having been made aware suddenly that the limit of their behavior was nothing my greatest fears could even conjure. We raised them here hoping. Now it was out of our hands. They would do what they liked. Maybe it had always been out of our hands. Maybe anything we could have wanted to instill in them was, at best, a hope.
In time, I knew, we could work our way around it, I could become accustomed, even on that night I told myself there was nothing the human heart could not grow to endure, that the miracle of the human heart is that it expands in its capacity to accept, to love.
