Hotline Quotes

“People’s lives here are easier and harder all at once. They’re never at risk, but their safety and stability can turn into a cage. They’re free to pursue their dreams, but they’re held back by the responsibilities that come along with them.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline

“For a long time I couldn’t fight my sadness. It was as though I were encased in it, like someone had placed me in a barrel and poured concrete and left me to dry.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline: A Novel

“that progress is not always perceptible on the surface, it doesn’t always appear where we want to see it, even though it may be happening constantly and incrementally.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline

“the end, I’m taking my first-ever sick day. I let Omar walk to school by himself in the morning. I didn’t want to, but that list of things I told myself I’d never allow and then done? Yaneh it’s getting pretty long.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline: A Novel

“If ghosts can live without bodies, then why can’t our bodies continue on without ghosts?”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline

“I undress, look at myself in the mirror with no special acknowledgement of the worn-down woman who looks back at me, and then climb into the shower, turn on the hot water, and once the temperature’s set to exactly where I want it, when the water begins to feel like a womb, I cry into my palms. Under the shower’s waterfall, I squint, sniffle, choke. I cough. I stutter my way through every defeated sound I know, and I hate myself for making them. I hope no one can hear me, and that the shower will keep my secret. I cry like that until I have nothing left in me, until I’ve been emptied, and then I stop and decide that it’s over, that I should stop feeling sorry for myself. That I’ve already held myself together for this long. That I can’t break apart again now.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline

“But now I’m seeing that no one pays any attention to anyone else, and so many people behind these desks and phones and offices are lonely. They don’t like themselves even though they’ve done everything they’re supposed to do. They work hard, get good jobs, get married, have families, but the years still weigh them down as they try to keep up with their own expectations.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline

“more a haunting of closeness than closeness itself.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline

“You don’t need anyone to help you.” “That doesn’t mean I don’t want it.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline

“There’s a distance between how we see the world, and it forces us to speak slower to each other, to really think about and listen to everything we say.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline

“Love is an obligation that you fall in love with over time. You will get to a place where you no longer see your lives as separate. Love is a plant that grows, and you are its custodians. You do not feel it so much as care for it, explore it, be tender to its tendencies, respect it.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline

“Here i am on my own, because of him, maybe free from a life that was turning into a prison, but cast away like a bad-luck omen too. Now I must give myself to others to survive. The world has judged that I've taken enough support for one lifetime.”
― Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotline