You should prize this pain of yours. This is what will make you human all the way through. Nothing less will do that.
Diana Abu-JaberHis expression seems a sort of surrender: the loss of a thing that he has already lost before.
Diana Abu-JaberThe 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-JaberLove and prayer are intimately related.
Diana Abu-JaberSlavery 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-JaberHe 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-JaberPeople look at you and forget about things.
Diana Abu-JaberThere'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-JaberThere'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-JaberYou want to protect you children, don't you? You let them out of your body but you never let them all the way out.
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