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41 " Here is something you have to understand about stories: They point you in the right direction but they can't take you all the way there. Stories are crescent moons; they glimmer in the night sky, but they are most exquisite in their incomplete state. Because people crave the beauty of not-knowing, the excitement of suggestion, and the sweet tragedy of mystery. "
― Diana Abu-Jaber , Crescent
42 " His expression seems a sort of surrender: the loss of a thing that he has already lost before. "
43 " ..cold, like swallowed tears. "
44 " Love and prayer are intimately related. "
45 " Sometimes when she lies awake her body feels as finely made as a tuning fork. She can hear and smell the most delicate things, the smell and music of thought itself. "
46 " There'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. "
47 " You want to protect you children, don't you? You let them out of your body but you never let them all the way out. "
48 " The streets of Aqaba are shell spirals and, on summer nights, crowded and complicated as a woman's heart. "
49 " She let herself stray past the stage of sleep and even past the stage of remembering, and she wanders into the stage of soul-searching. Sometimes when she lies awake her body feels as finely made as a tuning fork. She can hear and smell the most delicate things, the smell and music of thought itself. "
50 " The sky is white. "
51 " He 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. "
52 " There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier. "
53 " He believes that this man has looped a bit of the thread-leash through a corner of his soul. "
54 " ..a phantasm, a pink-palmed jinn, a ghost from one of the drowned cities. "
55 " She wonders sometimes if it's a sort of flaw or lack in her - the inability to lose herself in someone else. . . . she's never quite understood how people could trade in quiet spaces and solitary gardens and courtyards, thoughtful walks and the delicious rhythms of work, for the fearful tumult of falling in love. "
56 " The way I look at it, you should feel glad that Han found out about the bad thing. It’s the only way to know if someone can love you— if they still love you even after they know about the bad thing. Or the twenty-eight bad things. All of it. "
57 " This is also a story about what a good thing it is to forgive— a relief to the one who did the bad thing, and a great relief to the one who gets to forgive! "
58 " Why does no one in America recite poetry?” Aziz complains. “They go to the coffeehouse and they just drink the coffee. "
59 " There are so many slight things she can distinguish between her senses: she can smell the difference between lavender and clover honeys; she can feel the softening progression of ripeness in a pear; and she can sense how much heat is rising in a panful of gravy, lentils, garlic. "
60 " Li Pin Chu tells them that if he could eat one dish every day for the rest of his life it would be sliced pork and egg in palm sugar. Han says he would enjoy some chicken stewed in onion yogurt sauce. Sirine thinks she might like some reheated spaghetti and meatballs- a breakfast that her mother used to make from the previous night's dinner. "
