Crescent Quotes

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“...tasting a piece of bread that someone bought is like looking at that person, but tasting a piece of bread that they baked is like looking out of their eyes.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“People look at you and forget about things.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“Here is something you have to understand about stories: They point you in the right direction but they can't take you all the way there. Stories are crescent moons; they glimmer in the night sky, but they are most exquisite in their incomplete state. Because people crave the beauty of not-knowing, the excitement of suggestion, and the sweet tragedy of mystery.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“She stares at her knife and wishes she were smarter about things. Wishes she knew how to say something wise or consoling to him, something that wouldn't sound frightened or awkward. But then she remembers the time after her parents' death, when people would approach her and try to explain her loss to her; they said things that were supposed to cure her of her sadness, but that had no effect at all. And she knew then, even when she was nine years old, that there was no wise or consoling thing to say. There were certain helpful kinds of silences, and some were better than others. ”
― Diane Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“The loneliness of the arab is a terrible thing; it is all consuming. It is already present like a little shadow under the heart when he lays his head on his mother's lap; it threatens to swallow him whole when he leaves his own country, even though he marries and travels and talks to friends twenty-four hours a day. That is the way Sirine suspects that Arabs feel everything - larger than life, feelings walking in the sky.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“Tomorrow is the start of Ramadan, a month of daily fasting, broken by an iftar, a special meal after sunset and a bite before sunrise. Han has told her that the idea behind the fast of Ramadan is to remind everyone of the poor and less fortunate, a time of charity, compassion, abstinence, and forgiveness. And even though Um-Nadia claims to have no religion and many of their customers are Christians, they all like to eat the traditional foods prepared throughout the Middle East to celebrate the nightly fast-breaking during Ramadan. There are dishes like sweet qatayif crepes and cookies and creamy drinks and thick apricot nectar.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“His expression seems a sort of surrender: the loss of a thing that he has already lost before.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“..cold, like swallowed tears.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“She let herself stray past the stage of sleep and even past the stage of remembering, and she wanders into the stage of soul-searching. Sometimes when she lies awake her body feels as finely made as a tuning fork. She can hear and smell the most delicate things, the smell and music of thought itself.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“The streets of Aqaba are shell spirals and, on summer nights, crowded and complicated as a woman's heart.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“There's a time when things go out of tune. It's not all the time. It's not even a lot of the time. But it is some of the time. And then you have to deal with it all. Everything comes out wrong. You dream about goats and monkeys. People start to look at things wrong. Maybe you think the world looks squashed and flat. Maybe you get stones in the bulgar and you burn the smoked wheat.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“Love and prayer are intimately related.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“She wonders sometimes if it's a sort of flaw or lack in her - the inability to lose herself in someone else. . . . she's never quite understood how people could trade in quiet spaces and solitary gardens and courtyards, thoughtful walks and the delicious rhythms of work, for the fearful tumult of falling in love.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“You want to protect you children, don't you? You let them out of your body but you never let them all the way out.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“He tells about his Sudanese roommate at Georgetown who owned a prayer rug with a compass to find Mecca built right into it. "After a few weeks in America, he rolled it up and used the compass to go camping," Han says.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“The sky is white.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“This is also a story about what a good thing it is to forgive— a relief to the one who did the bad thing, and a great relief to the one who gets to forgive!”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“The flavors are intense in her mouth, the sweet-almondy fruitiness of the pistachios beside the smoky sour taste of the sumac, delicate saffron, and herbal notes of olive.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“..a phantasm, a pink-palmed jinn, a ghost from one of the drowned cities.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“He believes that this man has looped a bit of the thread-leash through a corner of his soul.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“Sometimes when she lies awake her body feels as finely made as a tuning fork. She can hear and smell the most delicate things, the smell and music of thought itself.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“The way I look at it, you should feel glad that Han found out about the bad thing. It’s the only way to know if someone can love you— if they still love you even after they know about the bad thing. Or the twenty-eight bad things. All of it.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“She is stirring a pot of leben yogurt, which is heated slowly, carefully, tenderly, and hopefully, layered with butter and onions and heady and rich as a high summer night. She cannot stop stirring because it is a fragile, temperamental sauce, given to breaking and curdling if given its way. So she must wait and stand and stir and stir and stir and look and look.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“There's a recipe from the medieval book that she wants to try- an omelet fried in oil and garlic, a stuffing of crushed walnuts, hot green chili peppers, and pomegranate seeds. She goes to the cabinets and the refrigerator and begins to work while her uncle sits at the table and opens his history of Constantinople. She stands at the table, peeling and mincing onions, then fries the omelet lightly, turning it once, and its aroma is rich and complicated.
The dish is sweet, tender, and so delicious that it's virtually ephemeral, the eggs dissolving in their mouths.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“She has started to taste her own cooking in a professional way again. Detached, critical, and overly scrupulous. It tastes somewhat different from how she remembers it. Her flavors have gotten somehow stranger, darker and larger: she stirs roasted peppers into the hummus and apricots and capers into the chicken. And she walks into the basement storage room one day and discovers Victor Hernandez kissing Mireille on the butcher block table among the onion skins. Mireille, then Sirine, burst into laughter. Later, Sirine realizes it's the first time she's really laughed in a year.
A month later, Mireille is engaged to Victor Hernandez and Victor moves in with her and Um-Nadia. He makes three different kinds of mole sauces for their wedding dinner, and chocolate and cinnamon and black pepper sweetcake.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“There are so many slight things she can distinguish between her senses: she can smell the difference between lavender and clover honeys; she can feel the softening progression of ripeness in a pear; and she can sense how much heat is rising in a panful of gravy, lentils, garlic.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent