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21 " It started off as ordinary, a little boy fretting. Abdullah asked only Riham, who’d become Mama, soothing him when he woke from nightmares. She didn’t tell Latif; it never occurred to her there was something bigger, that Abdullah would put things together, connect dots to form a chilling picture. The anger came later. "
― Hala Alyan , Salt Houses
22 " He can feel their eyes upon him. Poor innocent things, he thinks. 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. "
23 " When Salma peers into her daughter’s coffee cup, she knows instantly she must lie. "
24 " You’ve been emotionally code-switching all your life,” Seham likes to say, and while Manar used to protest, lately she has been accepting it, reveling "
25 " diaspora, there were people over here being Palestinian. At checkpoints, "
26 " Salma had begun to recognize that the world was no longer made for certain types of women. There was a need for spine and even anger. "
27 " Atef feels the weight of his daughter droop against him. She puts an arm around his shoulder, tucks her chin on it. He remembers her monkeyish limbs as a child, the way she would stick her tongue out at passersby on the street. “Baba,” she whispers. He waits but there is nothing else. "
28 " They fought about Elie’s novel, the same goddamn novel Souad had heard about as a teenager in that Kuwaiti café. It was like an unwanted houseguest that haunted her marriage. It was never-ending. Elie would speak at times of being nearly finished, then something would shift, and he’d call the whole thing rubbish and spend weeks morosely staring out of the study window. "
29 " She winds her hair into a bun, tilts her long neck back, and parts her lips. It is like watching someone paint the sky. "
30 " Easier, she thinks, to remember nothing, to enter a world already changed, than have it transform before your eyes. In the palaces, the grandparents must sit in their extravagant rooms, remembering sand. "
31 " Nostalgia is an affliction. Someone said that once in front of Alia, and the words reach her now, years later. Like 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. Alia thinks of her bedroom in Nablus. The seashells she filled with bobby pins. "
32 " Love and fear for the girl have the same metallic taste. "
33 " bordered on the majestic. Souad watched "
34 " Monumental little things, heavy and hollow at once, with the contradictory weight of eggs. "
35 " grandmother’s building. When she was in bed sometimes, her small heart pounding just before she fell into sleep, she felt an endless plummet, as though someone had pushed her. Her fear had something to do with not being able to breathe, her mouth filled with water, with some enduring want. A suffocation. It was something like pursuit, something like not being fast enough. "
36 " And Alia, clasping her shivering daughter as she heaved, holding her so tightly the girl had tugged for air, as she wept and grabbed at her daughter—as the drowning lunge for wood or flesh or tire—for the rest of the day, Alia understood that she’d very nearly been punished. "
37 " How tiny our lives are, he thinks, swelling to impossible size with love, then shrinking again. He puts an arm around his daughter and pulls her close, this girl he will lose eventually to something. She settles against him. For long moments, they sit together in the dark, watching the "
38 " Instead she remained still, touching the sprout, recognizing in that moment that there were some things we are meant to keep for ourselves, too precious to share with others. "
39 " It fascinates Manar—not just history "
40 " All those deaths, the bloodshed. And then I think about what’s happening in the world now. Sometimes it seems—” Riham falters. “That Allah is cruel.” Riham nods. Her grandmother leans down and, unexpectedly, kisses Riham on her forehead. She speaks lightly. “There’s nothing wrong with having questions for Allah. It means you’re taking Him seriously. "