Too Soon Quotes

“Some won't want to root for a Palestinian chick wrestling with the best white culture has to offer, miffed that I dare to stage their tragedies as if they were comedies.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Feeling lost is not a reason to have kids," the wise and prescient boy tells her. "It's not fair to them."
What neither says-but both know to be true—is that the girl is the kind of creature who has never seen the world as fair and, therefore, she was not required to be.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“The only thing that feels real to me is that
my mother is gone.
In some ways, this year after I lost my mom has been a time of excavation. I spend it trying to discover who she was.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“To act onstage is to revel in the slipperiness of life, to be yourself and not yourself at the same time. It's the one time you can take two journeys at once.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“In the end, I was my mother's daughter. We had never been angels, nor did we aspire to be.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“I would never trust that my world wouldn't be turned upside down, that racism wouldn't make it so that every generation in my family would have to start over from the bottom and claw our way back to the top. But I also felt the unshakable confidence that comes from living through that experience. We might have to start over, penniless, but we were of the ilk that knew we could.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“A woman of forty is a flower fully unfurled. It’s also the instant before she starts to wilt.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Poor children. If the source of their pain is their parent, that parent is often their only source of salvation. I do not remember the experience of carrying this particular girl in my belly. Her birth felt like a blur of torture. They all did, after the shock of my first. But I would always remember how it felt to have her asleep in my arms, the bodily comfort bringing relief, even in my terror for her. It was that feeling I would long for decades later, as I lay withering away alone in Detroit. Not to be held, but to hold a child who forgave me everything, who gave me absolution I did not deserve.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“If there is an injustice done to girls everywhere, it is teaching them to err on the side of politeness. It costs them.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“We rarely spoke of my children. They felt like newcomers, who belonged to the future.
My mother and I wanted to mine our past.
Mothers are expected to die first, but having one around when you are dying is a source of comfort.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Does the body know better than we do? Does it understand when we are done with life? A part of me wanted to believe I was choosing my exit. A part of me was still in control. That is what I tried to think, when I could think, when the pain was not mind-numbing.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Memorization remaps the brain's neural networks. It reorganizes your master muscle. The human attempt to harness our minds is why we have mantras, why we say prayers, why we make plays. Memorizing the text of a tragedy in its entirety, as I had done in Arabic, by listening to it over and over, does a number on you. You carry the useless deaths and the maddening sorrows within your folds until you forget. Until the lines you've learned are lost.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“What would have happened to me if I had made entirely different choices? If I had run away? Not submitted to marrying a stranger? Actually gone to college instead of pretending to do so? Who knows? No one did and no one ever would.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Let it be noted that the Palestinian and the Jew must agree to disagree. Surprise, surprise!" I said, and again we laughed, hard and loud and involuntary. It was not unlike a sort of vomiting, a removing of bile, an expulsion of poison.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Who was Yoav to me? "Just some Jew," I said in as dismissive a voice as I could muster. If you can feel your humanity shrink, your life span shorten, or the arteries of your heart start to harden, I felt it all in that moment.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“There were a thousand ways to be a fool but the surest one was to believe a compliment. No one wished you well. No one said anything nice for free. Everyone is a salesman, even if all they want you to buy is a worldview in which they are nice people whom it would behoove you to keep around. When people complimented her, my mother would scoff. "Never believe praise, especially from pretty people," she told me. "Because they receive adulation for their looks, they believe that's the way everyone speaks to everyone. They think it's normal.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“I was my most attractive the year I turned forty. A woman that age is a rose in full bloom with all her layers unfurled and the once-hidden folds within her shamelessly on display. For the first time, she is nourished enough to stretch out, open, expand...
A woman of forty is a flower fully unfurled. It's also the instant before she starts to wilt.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“And then we were on the same planet again. Or rather we were meeting somewhere in between, where stars twinkle and comets streak by, in the vast and glorious space where people from different worlds come together when they speak about art.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“A part of yearning to stay somewhere, of feeling you've found a home, is discovering a place where you would not be sorry to die.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“For that moment, we were magnetic beings beyond such limitations, drawn together to do what we were put on this earth to do, and could only do together. We were going to make a show.
Unlike Aziz, I wasn't searching for a point to life. I was looking to feel enthralled by it.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Slowly, patiently, I did what so many women have done for men when they suffer wounds that leave no mark, when they feel powerless because they are. I kissed him alive. We began to make love tentatively, mournfully. We made the kind of love that only survivors make and only with each other, feeling the intactness of each other's bodies while knowing so many of our people are not so lucky.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Were Esther and I kind to other mothers, the women who arrived friendless to the park with their children in tow and tried to make small talk with us over the years? No. If they greeted us, we were forced to greet them back, then we'd fall silent until they got the hint and moved away. We felt overstretched as mothers, daughters, and wives. Was it so wrong for us to decide we didn't owe anyone else an ounce of our energy in the hours we were together?”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“All they have to do is say our people are violent, not even prove it, and they can do anything they want to us. The horrors they have systemically inflicted upon us beggar the imagination and yet we're supposedly the violent ones! Must be nice. To act like demons and demonize anyone who gives you a taste of your own medicine.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Beautiful? Me? In the space of a day, I had been told I was ugly by my mother and the opposite by my husband. Only one could be true. Which was it? Maybe there was no truth, only what you could fool people into believing.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“If my mother called me on my bluff, was I ruthless enough to go through with my threat to betray her to my father? Could I use everything in my power to destroy someone who was trying to destroy me?
In short, was I my mother's daughter?
I touched my knife to the tip of the tomato.
Rather than slice it, I found myself sinking my teeth into its skin, half-hoping it would
scream.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“We girls weren't people who possessed eyes that could watch the boys watching us. We were portals to their manhood. The thing about selecting a portal is that it sets you on a path. There is no return. You only get to choose once. You have to choose wisely.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Her way of punishing me was to close herself off. Never give me the space to apologize, so she would never have to face the fact that some sins are unforgivable. They go with you to the grave. Those sins always involve children.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“There was more than distance between Naya and me. I could no longer step outside my home, board a plane, and see her. We weren't inhabiting the same earth. I was in the past and she in the present. Or was it a future I would never see? Maybe that's how death happened. It wasn't your spirit leaving your body. It was a space you inhabit receding into a different realm, as the world spun on.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“At the end of the day I was still someone who put on plays by dead white men. Why? Because I liked their plays and some part of me felt I had the right to do with this life exactly what I liked. How many decades would I get to make theatre? Three? Four? It hit me I didn't share his sense of mission. I didn't share his worldview. What kind of artist would I be if I did?”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon

“Your life, not the plays you put on, is our story. You're a daughter of a people who are demonized for the crime of refusing to be erased, who show the world there is a difference between a defenseless people and a defeated one. When the story of Palestine is told, it's the artists that history will remember. We've been flung to every corner of the globe. Wherever we find ourselves, we thrive. Call us animals? Go ahead. Depict us as monsters? Irrational? Uncivilized? No matter. History will remember the truth. Wherever we go, people like you prove we contribute. We make beauty. We make art.”
― Betty Shamieh, Too Soon