Home > Author > Camilla Gibb
1 " The smell of home was indistinguishable from the smell of leaving home: each inhalation a mix of familiarity and fear. "
― Camilla Gibb , The Beauty of Humanity Movement
2 " If only I could rest for a time in quiet pain and awaken new and willing. He is looking forward and I am inward. "
― Camilla Gibb , Mouthing the Words
3 " How is it that disappointment arrives as soon as what you have desired for so long steps over the threshold? It’s like finding the end of your wedding train dragging behind in the mud. "
― Camilla Gibb , Sweetness in the Belly
4 " Clench clench these strong teeth in this strong mouth. My mouth. Of my body. In my house. My mouth? Chapped lips swollen and bloody? Dream dreaming wide and thunder? My mouth! My God! This is me speaking. Not mouthing. Not typing and twitching. Not writing a suicide note the length of a novel that will never be finished. I hear voices now but I know they are not the voices of fathers or lovers, or mothers or angels or demons, but the sounds of my own private wars echoing the battles of women before me and near me. No wonder I do not make people comfortable. I am a mirror. I have far too many things to say. (p. 237-238) "
5 " I was not always a Muslim, but once I was led into the absorption of prayer and the mysteries of the Qur’an, something troubled in me became still. "
― Camilla Gibb
6 " She asked me if Christmas was a particularly tense time and whether my father had ever hit my mother while trimming the tree. I couldn't remember anything like that happening, and although it seemed possible, I was suspicious when she asked me if my father had ever thrust the silver star at my mother to deliberately pierce her hand. I said "no" and she said "the bastard" and we both looked a little confused. (p. 9) "
7 " Ethiopia doesn't matter to the West," I say, stating the obvious. "We offer them nothing they can exploit. "
8 " The velvet darkness of his face "
9 " She kisses the children goodnight, leaving lipstick on their foreheads and a trail of Chanel No.5. "
10 " The reality of this wide-eyed caramel-coloured wonder was arresting. This was the future, alive and kicking in my arms. "
11 " You would fancy any man who gave you baklava," I tease. "You think I am some kind of sharmuta for sweets? "
12 " That idea is strange to me. People keep on loving? People keep on loving even if you are not there in their face everyday to remind them? People keep on loving even if they no longer see you at all? People keep on loving even if they are loving someone else? Impossible: to believe you can be loved in absence when you don't even know how it feels to be loved when you are there. "
13 " It is his absence that is part of me and has been for years. This is who I am, perhaps who we all are, keepers of the absent and the dead. It is the blessing and burden of being alive. "
14 " Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made. "
15 " Writing made it tolerable to be human in a way nothing else ever had. It gave me a place to thrive, to exorcise, to cultivate some understanding of aspects of being human that were otherwise confounding. "
― Camilla Gibb , This is Happy
16 " It is harder in many ways to live in the middle than at the edges. Much harder to interpret as you see fit, because then you have no assurance you are doing right in the eyes of God, no confidence you will be rewarded in the afterlife "
17 " He wrote the future onto my face with his lips. "
18 " In tourism college they were taught that American notions of what constitutes a personal question are quite different from their own. Tư has learned this the hard way, through responses to questions like: And what do they pay you to be a pharmaceutical representative with GlaxoSmithKline, Mr. Clark? Is this lady your wife or your daughter? Do they have the death penalty in your state of Texas? Why are the insides of your ears so hairy? "
19 " The history of Vietnam lies in this bowl, for it is in Hanoi, the Vietnamese heart, that phở was born, a combination of the rice noodles that predominated after a thousand years of Chinese occupation and the taste for beef the Vietnamese acquired under the French, who turned their cows away from ploughs and into bifteck and pot-au-feu. The name of their national soup is pronounced like this French word for fire... "
20 " I never expected to be happy, to have a sense of belonging somewhere. I didn't grow up with a sense that this was possible or even desirable. I'm quite sure my parents didn't either, so I come by this honestly. "
