Silence Is a Sense Quotes

“I want to tell him I love the taste of his words, how they feel rolling around the tongue of my mind’s voice, how they slither down my chest and hum into the caverns of my heart, how they sometimes slide further down and pluck between my legs, where I can no longer distinguish pain from pleasure.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“strong or weak or good or bad or whatever. It’s a spectrum. It’s always a spectrum.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence is a Sense

“Humanize. That’s what they say, when they’re fawning over certain books and documentaries and films. […] A well-intentioned word that nevertheless concedes the argument that some people are not people and so require some art form to render them human.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“Religious conflict is sexy. It’s easy to sell, the way it fits into the simple, dichotomous way people prefer to view the world. It’s easy for news producers and politicians to frame it in terms of a cosmic war being waged in a land far, far away. But it isn’t real. This isn’t a religious conflict—or if it is now, it certainly didn’t start out that way.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“Arms folded, eyes hard, his lips move in that same old recitation of Darwish he gave to me hundreds of times, so that though he doesn’t speak, I hear the words as clearly as when he murmured them down the line on lonely nights in Damascus. A poem about identity, he said it was inscribed in the breast of every Arab—whether they were, like him, rooted in Palestine or not. Those roots, stretching back before the invention of time, before the blossoming of eras. Those lines, I could see them, blood red, as though Khalid were scratching them onto the wall of my mind or pressing them into the chambers of my heart.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“There is a kind of deceit to memories, where you’re never entirely sure something happened the way you remember.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“Yeah, I vote. We all vote. All me mates do. But it’s not enough. Voting will only get you so far, especially when it’s a choice between bad and worse. All politicians are gutless crooks. Everyone knows that. The system is corrupt. You can’t play within it. You have to look outside it, wreck it from the outside. Dismantle and topple it.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“There is no sound; it feels as if my heart has stilled, ceased trying to pound its way out of my ribs.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“What do they see, the people in the windows, when they look into mine? I try to project myself, release this body and all the things that weigh it down, soar over concrete, and inhabit some space over there. I imagine looking out, seeing through the eyes of another. What is it they see in West Tower, fourth floor, flat three?”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“It’s too quiet, but there’s nothing I can do about it. To play music off the laptop would alert her to the fact that I can hear, and that’s not a conversation I’m about to have with anyone. So I sit there, against the wall, and drink the disgusting juice.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“That old nan in your building,” she says, over-enunciating every word, “she pointed at your window last night, when she were talking to the police, and she said, ‘The deaf girl saw everything too.’ Can you read lips?” I nod.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“If recall and recollect mean to “call” and “collect” again, does refugee contain within it, hidden and folded in a dead language, the notion of perpetual fleeing?”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“Vomiting until my insides feel like they’re twisting up and out of my throat like vines.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“We are in Serbia. Tomorrow or the next day is Hungary. This is where the real struggle begins, he says. Sweat drips wet and metallic onto my face, into my mouth. How can it possibly get any worse? It will never happen. I will never reach the end. My life is here, in the ebb and flow of humans pushing and being shoved back across borders, shuttled from detention center to filthy campground to open fields and rocky beaches. This is to be my life.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“Is it my job, as a Muslim, to try to convince you not to be afraid of me? That my people are not hardwired to hate you, to want to blow you up on a tube or ram you with a van?”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“The thing is, when you can’t speak, people assume you can’t hear either.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense

“I have a box too. In my head. It’s where I keep the things that are too much, the things that don’t make sense. Images and sounds and smells and textures languish in boxes, stuffed and secreted, stacked up in a room in my mind. They fill the corners, rise higher and higher, box over box, to the ceiling. At times, the room bulges and heaves like a belly in labor. Sharp edges poke at my mind. It’s hardly ever quiet in there.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense