Home > Author > Camilla Gibb
21 " In order to know someone who is at some level unknowable, you must leave yourself wide open. If you don't, you foreclose the possibility of learning something critical about this person you need, your parent, the person upon whom your survival depends. It's like time-lapse photography; your lens at maximum aperture in order to capture something fleeting and elusive. The problem becomes one of calibration. How to protect yourself in the process. How to capture something without going blind. "
― Camilla Gibb , This is Happy
22 " If someone eliminates the obstacles you believe to be in front of you, then you have no choice but to try. Fail spectacularly, if you will, but try. "
23 " Okay, so yours is not a map of blood. But can't you see? This is a map of love. "
― Camilla Gibb , Sweetness in the Belly
24 " This is not the true meaning of jihad,” he spoke into the starless dark. “Jihad is the holy war we have within ourselves. That is the meaning below the surface. Our internal struggle for purity,” he said with emphasis, pressing his forefinger into his chest. “It is the war of ascendance over our basal instincts. It has absolutely nothing to do with others. The only thing we can have control over is ourselves. "
― Camilla Gibb
25 " Religion is a thing of the past, the Party said, an instrument of oppression that keeps the common man in bondage. "
― Camilla Gibb , The Beauty of Humanity Movement
26 " We come to know ourselves only through stories. We listen to the stories of others, we inherit the stories of those who came before, and we make sense of our own experiences by constructing a narrative that holds them, and holds us, together. Stories are how we make sense of our lives. "
27 " I marvelled at her capabilities as a mother - naturally empathic but no pushover, funny and generous, frank about her own limitations and the challenges of parenting, loving and affectionate but unsentimental - absolutely solid in her role. "
28 " HOw do you protect a child from heartbreak? All I know is the egg wants to be held all the time, and perhaps if I hold her all the time she will know that she is loved in such a fundamental and profound way that when her heart is broken as an adult, she will not fall apart, will know that she is still loved and lovable. "
29 " I suspect we can all be domesticated by love, but when love is threatened or broken, our suspicions and mistrust are confirmed. Experience has made us this way.........Because if you believe in what's promised, if you become invested, you take the risk of a broken heart. "
30 " Girls are not passive by nature. They are only so because the culture demands they be. "
31 " I've tried to read, but I can't make it through more than a paragraph at a time. The floor is littered with abandoned newspapers and yogurt pots. "
32 " My body is a whisper where hers is a shout. "
33 " Believing that all has been ordained by God can lead to fatalism, but fatalism is not the same thing as belief. It's a cheat: an abdication of responsibility. "
34 " We were ashes to ashes fascinated by this movement, heaven bound invariably, for there is no hell anymore when it has arrived here on earth. "
35 " The best we can do is knot these threads at the ends so they won’t unravel any further. "
36 " Every evening for weeks, Amina and the several other Ethiopians who lived in the building by then crowded into my flat to watch in horror as a parade of bodies on the verge of crumbling into dust crawled across the screen. We were sickened with ourselves for being riveted by the spectacle of this death march. We were ashes to ashes fascinated by this movement, heaven bound invariably, for there is no hell anymore when it has arrived here on earth. "
37 " The sound of communal prayer—its growling honesty, its rhythm as relentless and essential as heartbeats—moves me with its direction and makes me believe that distance can be overcome. It is the only thing that offers me hope that where borders and wars and revolutions divide and scatter us, something singular and true unites us. It tames this English soil. "
38 " We know plenty of Ethiopians in London who do not even furnish their flats. What possessions they acquire sit in their cardboard boxes ready for transport. The tower of boxes holding televisions, toaster ovens, microwaves, electric heaters teeters to the left of the door, ready to be shipped at a moment’s notice. They commit to nothing. They float on the myth of return. "
39 " 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. "
40 " It felt like betrayal, but in truth it was simply Muhammed Bruce’s lament for the passing of an era. A time when Europeans had roamed the earth in pursuit of adventure, largely oblivious to the lives and laws of the people in the countries they picked through like cherries. Spitting out the pits. Just like my parents. They had stomped on the world like the Burtons of their era, only worse somehow because they did not think that their shoes left marks. "