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Hala Alyan QUOTES

Hala Alyan QUOTES

1 " She feels the anger quiet into a briny resentment. The bitterness floats like an inkblot in her mind’s eye. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

2 " She still loves him. This is the fact she wakes up to each morning. She checks it, sometimes, a tongue probing an aching tooth, making sure it still hurts. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

3 " The sea was like another member of the household, a recalcitrant child at times, a soothing aunt at others. She crooned them awake; she crooned them to sleep. Everywhere, there was the smell of salt. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

4 " Mustafa and Atef have joined the men by the fig tree..... Soon, there will be an argument; there always is. Blisters of rage, which must be drained. And the women, intimate with such scenes, will rise wearily, go to their husbands or brothers or fathers. Speak to them in soothing voices. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

5 " I'm here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.

I'm here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful. "

― Hala Alyan

6 " What is a life? A series of yeses and noes, photographs you shove in a drawer somewhere, loves you think will save you but that cannot. Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. That's all life is, he wants to tell her. It's continuing. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

7 " Nostalgia is an affliction. Life a fever or a cancer, the longing for what had vanished wasting a person away. Not just the unbearable losses, but the small things as well. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

8 " Motherhood doesn’t suit me, she once confessed to Budur, drunk. I don’t have the stomach for not knowing what comes next. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

9 " I've been working on the same joke for years. The punchline is you were happy all along. "

― Hala Alyan , The Twenty-Ninth Year

10 " So they’ve seen their parents up close, as one does with statues in Florence. The cracked toes and chalky masonry. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

11 " Parallel lives, she sometimes thinks. It was a matter of parallel lives, one person having lamb for supper, the other cucumbers. With fate deciding, at random, which was which. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

12 " It would become the girl’s most endearing and exasperating quality, how she could become enamored of things already gone. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

13 " America wasn’t like that. You became what you coveted. Memories were short. She met Mexicans, Germans, Libyans, who spoke accented English but responded, From here, whenever asked. Souad became brown. People’s eyes glazed over when she tried to explain that, yes, she’d lived in Kuwait, but no, she wasn’t Kuwaiti, and no, she had never been to Palestine, but yes, she was Palestinian. That kind of circuitous logic had no place over there. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

14 " It is not enough
to say 'love' in Arabic.
You must say
'be the thing that buries me. "

― Hala Alyan

15 " Atef wants to tell his children that they don’t understand, that their view from the sidelines is incomplete, that somehow in the murky cave of his marriage—not exactly happy but not unhappy either, given to strain, months at a time when Alia retreats into her fury and Atef into himself—is a miraculous conch of love, something unpolished but alive, pulsing. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

16 " And life, life has swept her along like a tiny seashell onto sand, has washed over her and now, suddenly, she is old. Her mother is dead. There is no one to ask the questions she needs to ask. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

17 " What is a life? A series of yeses and noes, photographs you shove in a drawer somewhere, loves you think will save you but that cannot. Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. That’s all life is, he wants to tell her. It’s continuing. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

18 " But he loves the mosque for its dusty smell, for the carpet prickling his feet, for the predictable hum of the muezzin more than anything celestial. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

19 " recognizing in that moment that there were some things we are meant to keep for ourselves, too precious to share with others. She "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses

20 " It was Time, whirling her along, spinning, spinning, until it finally stopped, and she looked around, blinking, and she was thirty-two. "

― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses