Zeyn Joukhadar > Zeyn's Quotes

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Home is not where you are born;
home is where all your attempts
to escape cease.”
― Naguib Mahfouz

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It was the kind of love you have for someone because you'll die inside if you don't love something.”
― Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“without any assistance or guidance from you
i have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a day
i have been stood up four times
i've left 7 packages on yr doorstep
forty poems 2 plants & 3 handmade notecards i left
town so i cd send to you have been no help to me
on my job
you call at 3:00 in the mornin on weekdays
so i cd drive 27 1/2 miles cross the bay before i go to work
charmin charmin
but you are of no assistance
i want you to know
this waz an experiment
to see how selifsh i cd be
if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover
if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another
if i cd stand not being wanted
when i wanted to be wanted
& i cannot
so
with no further assistance & no guidance from you
i am endin this affair

this note is attached to a plant
i've been waterin since the day i met you
you may water it
yr damn self”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

“While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah

“Stories are powerful, but gather too many of the words of others in your heart and they will drown out your own. Remember that”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Don't forget,' he says, and Abu Sayeed looks up while he translates, holding the words back a little, 'stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It's living that hurts us.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“But safety is not about never having bad things happen to you. It's about knowing that the bad things can't separate us from each other.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“the story often matters less than the telling”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted
into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

“There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory

“That's all care is, I thought, it's just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale? This seemed like a hopeful thought at first, but then it's hard to look at things, or to look at them truly, and we can't look at many at once, and it's so easy to look away.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“Love isn’t just a matter of looking at someone, I think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“As we joined the line of people getting off at the last stop before Sofia, I looked once more at the little boy, whom I felt I would never forget, though maybe it wasn't exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn't what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn't really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“God smiles through the cracks in broken things.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Like most people, the name history gave them isn't what they call themselves.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“I am the dust of stars inhaled.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“People think that stories can be walled off, kept outside and separate. They can’t. Stories are inside you”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“I know God heard them both the same at the end, that he loved them both equally even though their prayers were different.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Last night was too dark for stars,' I say.
'No, little cloud.' Abu Sayeed lifts my chin with his finger. 'If anything, the darker the night, the brighter they shine.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“This is the street where Saint Paul stayed, where he fled after Allah blinded him with a flash of light on the road to Damascus," Mama says. "The street where the Lord sent Ananias to give Paul back his sight.'
'Why did God blind him?' I asked.
Abu Sayeed says, 'Maybe so he could give Paul his eyes.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“You are the stories you tell yourself.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“New York?" Itto looks down at me. "You may be American, but you are still Syrian."
I rub the camel's coarse hair with my palms. "How?"
"A person ca be two things at the same time," Itto says. "The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
― Toni Morrison

“There was nothing left for me to do, but go.
Though the things of the world were strong with me still.
Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; a friendly match-share beneath some collision-titled streetlight; a frozen clock, a bird visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug; towering off one’s clinging shirt post-June rain.
Pearls, rags, buttons, rug-tuft, beer-froth.
Someone’s kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease.
A bloody ross death-red on a platter; a headgetop under-hand as you flee late to some chalk-and-woodfire-smelling schoolhouse.
Geese above, clover below, the sound of one’s own breath when winded.
The way a moistness in the eye will blur a field of stars; the sore place on the shoulder a resting toboggan makes; writing one’s beloved’s name upon a frosted window with a gloved finger.
Tying a shoe; tying a knot on a package; a mouth on yours; a hand on yours; the ending of the day; the beginning of the day; the feeling that there will always be a day ahead.
Goodbye, I must now say goodbye to all of it.
Loon-call in the dark; calf-cramp in the spring; neck-rub in the parlour; milk-sip at end of day.
Some brandy-legged dog proudly back-ploughs the grass to cover its modest shit; a cloud-mass down-valley breaks apart over the course of a brandy-deepened hour; louvered blinds yield dusty beneath your dragging finger, and it is nearly noon and you must decide; you have seen what you have seen, and it has wounded you, and it seems you have only one choice left.
Blood-stained porcelain bowl wobbles face down on wood floor; orange peel not at all stirred by disbelieving last breath there among that fine summer dust-layer, fatal knife set down in pass-panic on familiar wobbly banister, later dropped (thrown) by Mother (dear Mother) (heartsick) into the slow-flowing, chocolate-brown Potomac.
None of it was real; nothing was real.
Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear.
These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and in this way, brought them forth.
And now we must lose them.
I send this out to you, dear friends, before I go, in this instantaneous thought-burst, from a place where time slows and then stops and we may live forever in a single instant.
Goodbye goodbye good-”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo