Against the Loveless World Quotes

“No one had ever kissed me with such love, and it occurred to me that happiness can reach such depths that it becomes something akin to grief.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“I colonized the colonizer’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“I think in saying 'loved each other,' Baldwin doesn't just mean the living. To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, and joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from..”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“I remember the shock of it, then questioning how it is that death can be life’s only assurance and yet also its greatest, most devastating surprise.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“It seemed to me that fate was inherited, like eye color. I wondered if she had felt the same disorientation that now ruled my days. Had it been all she could think about—the incomprehensibility of forced, permanent displacement?”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“Palestinians learned the first time in 1948 that leaving to save your life meant you would lose everything and could never go back.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“But I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“It amazed me to see how quickly they got comfortable in the new apartment and settled into a routine, as if their lives had simply been excised and replaced elsewhere, intact, with just a dusting of grief they shook off before returning to the business of living. Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“I wanted to describe to him how the emotional intimacy growing between us was shattering my heart in the most life-affirming ways, but I didn’t have the right words, except to say that I loved him, which wasn’t nearly enough. We spent that night, and every night together after, in a closeness I had never known, or even thought possible with another person. I was happy. Truly content. Drifting to sleep in Bilal’s arms, I thought about the hills beyond the terrace. Soon wild plum, peach, pear, fig, medlar, mulberry, date, and almond trees would bloom.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“I think he just means that we should fortify ourselves with love when we approach them. It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“We’re all part of each other. When you see what the Americans have done to us, what they’ve done to Iraq, Libya… And it breaks our hearts, all of us.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“The continuity of these traditions helped bridge the spaces between dislocation and the home I had forged in my birthright homeland, but I knew I could never again be complete in one place. This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere. To remain in one place meant tearing one’s limbs from another.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“I know in alone here. I’m not delusional. But the way memory animates the past is more real than the present.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“Music is like spoken language, inextricable from its culture. If you don't learn a language early in life, its words will forever come out wrinkled and accented by another world, no matter how well you memorize or love the vocabulary, grammar, and cadences of a new language. This is why foreign "belly dancers" have always bothered me. The use of our music as a prop to wiggle and shimmy and jump around offends me. Eastern music is the soundtrack of me..”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“No therapist or clergy can substitute for the confidence of a whore, because whores have no voice in the world, no avenue to daylight, and that makes us the most reliable custodians of secrets and truth.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“Blue whales subsist on krill. Krill is a Norwegian word. I wonder what it’s like to be Norwegian. What’s it like to be a whale? To live in water. To be the biggest creature on earth, still vulnerable to a small man’s greed.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“Feelings erode in here. Memories wear off. All that’s left are facts without the emotion that once accompanied them. I don’t cry in this place. There isn’t room enough for the heart to move. There are no winds to rustle it. Silence here is not the absence of sound, but the presence of a dense, unshakable stillness. Like dark matter in space, silence here is a living force that slides into all corners and seams. I have come to depend on it.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“Most of these women had ordinary lives, but life pulled the extraordinary out of them.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“You get one more day of self-pity, but tomorrow morning you get out of bed, clear your head, and decide how you will live. It is that simple. You make that one decision. Then you make another, and another. There are no forces holding you in this pathetic state. You are young, beautiful, and healthy. You have a home, family, and friends. Start from there.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“We are not all blessed to receive a good education and inherit what it takes to live with some dignity. To exist in your own land, in the bosom of your family and your history. To know where you belong in the world and what you're fighting for.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“Baldwin and Kanafani were contemporaries thousands of miles apart, who never met but lived parallel lives. They wrote with the same passion, the same irreverence and defiance; with overlapping wounds and bottomless love for their people. Baldwin was forced into self-imposed exile and Kanafani was assassinated by Israel. To be committed is to be in danger.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“From him I learned who those legislating morality and pretending to be more virtuous than the rest of us really are.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, and joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“For the ones we love, nothing is ever trouble, and everything is never enough.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“and Israelis had elected Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Beirut, as their prime minister, and his brutal legacy was already being felt.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“Their deceit, once planted in the public imagination—like the epic fabrication of a Jewish nation returning to its homeland—had grown into a living, breathing narrative that shaped lives as if it were truth.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“Fall in love if you must, but remember cruelty always has a dick.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“She was the first woman I met who truly hated men. She said it openly and without apology. I found her persuasive”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World