Home > Author > Zeyn Joukhadar

Zeyn Joukhadar QUOTES

Zeyn Joukhadar QUOTES

1 " I'm not the only one, of course. The last time I saw one of my male classmates from art school, he consoled me about my artist's block by telling me how few of the girls we studied with were painting anymore. It one one thing to have a body; it is another thing to struggle under the menacing weight of its meaning. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night

2 " To the night, I am a body without a past or a future, a pillar that bends light. The night doesn't know my name. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night

3 " I bow my head under her hands. “I couldn’t do it anymore, Teta.”
“My storm of the storms.” She tips the top of my head toward her and kisses it. “You never had to try. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night

4 " Sami’s chest rises and falls, and I realize that, with nothing in the way, he can hug his loved ones closer to his heart. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night

5 " I am a woman and a warrior. If you think I can't be both, you've been lied to. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars

6 " The most important places on a map are the places we haven't been yet "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars

7 " Sitt Shadid scoops me up in a bear hug, sweeping me into her round softness. I haven't been hugged, really hugged, in so long... But Sitt Shadid pats and rubs my back, and I relax. I reach across her wide arms, my cheek to her neck. She smells like jasmine flowers and olive soap. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars

8 " Even now, I sometimes run over in my mind all the men who catcall me the moment I step out my door, the men who corner me on subway platforms, the man who reached under my dress at a parade once and slipped his finger beneath my underwear. I think of my father complaining to my mother that the dishes weren't washed, or of the time they fought over something stupid and he called her a camel to shut her up. I grew up with dozens of boys who would one day become the same kind of man. Sometimes the world is one long chain of men from whose anger there is no protection, an obstacle course I run to stay safe. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night

9 " But you failed to realize that America has only ever deemed certain heritages worth preserving. If the Lenape were forced from their ancestral home on the island of Mannahatta, the eviction of Little Syria's impoverished immigrants is no surprise, and it's hard for me to imagine that things will ever be any different. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night

10 " I don’t understand why we were shelled.” Mama speaks soft, like she thinks we’re all asleep, like she’s afraid to wake us. Abu Sayeed says nothing at first. The car’s tires hum. The engine clacks and complains. “We may never understand,” he replies, just as quiet. “In times like these, it’s the small people who suffer. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars

11 " In one corner of the room are an array of small prints of the birds with gold foil laid painstakingly into individual feathers. This is not a room; it is a menagerie, and standing in the midst of it, I am one of its birds. Beside me at the door, Qamar is weeping, and I am trembling like a person in snow. One day, someone will try to explain us as they once tried to explain this, and they will not have the words. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night

12 " He is testing his body in the wind, feeling the weight and breadth of it. My heart is a new bird throwing itself against the space he is taking up. There are no long-legged white girls around us, no pale, over-cologned boys snicker-flirting with the bartender. Instead, all around us, there are brown and Black bodies marked with glow paint and tattoos. There are micro-minis and leather short-shorts and calf-length dresses in pleated faux silk atop unshaven legs. There are bodies with breasts, with thights, with scars, with canes; wearing high heels, wearing high tops; large bodies, small bodies, bodies that twirl and shake and fill the room. This is not dancing, but a becoming of winged creatures. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night

13 " Rent goes up and up and up. The family-owned boedgas keep on closing, replaced by artisanal cupcake shops and overpriced organic grocery stores whose customers hurry past the homeless and the flowers laid on street corners for Black boys shot by the cops. Some people go their whole lives in New York shutting their eyes to the fact that this city was built for the people who took this land from the Lenape. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night

14 " Don't forget,' he says, and Abu Sayeed looks up while he translates, holding the words back a little, 'stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It's living that hurts us. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars

15 " Stories are powerful, but gather too many of the words of others in your heart and they will drown out your own. Remember that "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars

16 " Every place you go becomes a part of you. But none more so than home. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars

17 " But safety is not about never having bad things happen to you. It's about knowing that the bad things can't separate us from each other. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars

18 " God smiles through the cracks in broken things. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars

19 " Like most people, the name history gave them isn't what they call themselves. "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars

20 " People think that stories can be walled off, kept outside and separate. They can’t. Stories are inside you "

― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Map of Salt and Stars