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21 " I was terrified that I was supposed to be living and I wasn’t, that I must have some prospect and I didn’t. "
― Ava Homa , Daughters of Smoke and Fire
22 " Why don’t you ask your darling son to make himself useful?” “He has to study.” “So do I!” I yelled, and my voice reverberated through the house. “Don’t kid yourself. With or without a degree, you’ll have to do what all women do. You might as well get good at it. "
23 " My father needed nursing just as much as the helpless Kurds in Iran, the homeless ones in Iraq, the hopeless ones in Turkey, and the stateless ones in Syria. "
24 " Baba didn’t wait for Chia to ask what La’nat Awa was. “The cursed place. Mass graves where prisoners are taken after execution, or if they die under torture, or if the subjects are just kidnapped or ‘disappeared,’ or if their families can’t afford to pay the bullet fee . . . Can you imagine? When they executed someone, they made the families pay for the very bullets that killed them just to get the body back. Kurdistan is full of mass graves, all called La’nat Awa. "
25 " In the snow-blanketed alleyway, kids were playing with mitten-covered hands; a beautiful girl was perched on the hood of a parked car, flirting with a man whose tongue dangled out of his open mouth like a thirsty dog. A middle-aged neighbor was shoveling his driveway joyfully, bobbing his head and singing along with the upbeat music blasting from his radio. If I could pack my unhappiness into snowballs, I would throw them at these people. "
26 " I bit the insides of my cheeks to swallow down my tears. Sitting across the dinner table was a man who had paid a massive price for hoping and trying for a just world, who had fathered and then neglected me, who wasn’t aware that the rage he harbored had killed all other impulses in him, chewing at the core of his compassion before spitting it back out. And here I was, sliding down a similar inevitable path. "
27 " That’s why he had kept his stories to himself: his crippling fear of not being understood. "
28 " In this country we are subhuman. We’re women, and we’re also Kurdish. I need some dignity, something to hope for. "
29 " If the walls of Iranian prisons testified to what they had witnessed firsthand, God’s heart would shatter into a million pieces. "
30 " Arguing with the rules, complaining about your bad hand . . . none of that works. Shift your focus on playing your hand the best you can and notice the difference, "
31 " The truth is that they don’t really want to kill us all. How else are they going to get people to vote for them if there isn’t some ‘enemy’ out there? I see it so clearly now. "
32 " Mama’s tenacity and unmatched skills at getting on people’s nerves made the authorities promise to return the body under the condition that the deceased’s family signed documents under oath, guaranteeing that they would neither hold a funeral nor bury him during daylight. Even after all this, it took them days to deliver the body they claimed was Chia’s. "
33 " I wondered what made one a Kurd and what made one half of that. "
34 " I looked at his serious face as he rubbed my shoulder affectionately. He looked down at me reassuringly, and my anger and fear evaporated. Life is perhaps that enclosed moment when my gaze destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes. Indeed. "
35 " Dreams matter, Leila gian.” He nodded, stood behind me, and whispered, “Desires matter. Take them seriously. "
36 " Did you know that our region has the world’s highest rate of female self-immolation? There. We hold one international record. Despite our long tradition of having female rulers and governors, we’ve become a nation of burned women. "
37 " Joanna, it’s so hard to love parents who don’t know how to love. It’s even harder to love yourself when your parents didn’t love you. "
38 " yearned to be a shiler, but I was a garden of anguish, of loathing, of torment; my occupied homeland was a birthplace of death. "
39 " As I ran, a wail escaped my chest. I was headed toward the main road, toward the world of men. The streets belonged to them. Judgmental men. Hypocritical men. Their-honor-depended-on-women men. "
40 " Settle for flying low and feeding on debris, and you’ll live a hundred years. “Chon beji sharta nakou chanda beji,” the eagle refuses. How long you lived was irrelevant; what mattered was how you lived. "