Home Fire Quotes
"Allah does not burden a soul with more than it can bear."
"When people talk about the enmity between Shias and Sunnis, it usually centers on some political imbalance of power, such as in Iraq or Syria—as a Brit, I don’t distinguish between one Muslim and another."
"Occupying other people’s territory generally causes more problems than it solves."
"Killing civilians is sinful—that’s equally true whether the manner of killing is a suicide bombing or aerial bombardments or drone strikes."
"My siblings and I were orphaned just after I finished uni. They were twelve years old—twins. I took the first job I could find. Now they’ve grown up; I can go back to my life."
"For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition."
"You British, never any sugar in your tea. My grandchildren are all the same."
"People in the neighborhood knew. The police would have found out. There was nothing I could do for him, so I did what I could for you, for us."
"That was the only word for this sense of enormous loss where there had been so very little to lose."
"But then again, no one told me I was missing out on holidays with cherries and gelato raining down."
"The world was dark and then there you were, blazing with light. How can anyone fail to love hope?"
"If you drop a tree on your neighbor's patio, all the fruit it ever bears is theirs by right—particularly if that stops them from suing you."
"I’ve spent every day the last six months sick with worry about him."
"Every so often there was a jagged break in the conventions of tube behavior: a man throwing a punch, a kiss so concentrated that train carriage or gondola ride or bedroom were irrelevant details."
"Muslim women, particularly the beautiful ones, need to be saved from Muslim men. Muslim men need to be detained, harassed, pressed against the ground with a heel on our throat."
"The Urdu word came closer than ‘friend’ to explaining how he thought of Farooq. Or even better, jigari dost—a friendship so deep it was lodged within you, could not be cut out without leaving a profound, perhaps fatal, wound."
"‘My brave warrior,’ Farooq said, as Parvaiz knelt down and waited for the agony to resume."
"Grief was a shape-shifter, and invisible too; grief could be captured as reflection in a twin’s eye."
"He imagined running a sword through Farooq’s throat, hearing the gurgle of blood."
"A man needed fire in his veins to burn through the world, not ice to freeze everything in place."
"The park—no more than twice the size of the Lone family garden—was bound in by railings and banyan trees, with an open gate toward which she was walking."
"In the stories of wicked tyrants, men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families—their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves."
"I hate the Muslims who make people hate Muslims."
"I don’t know why I was lucky enough for her to feel that way about me—my father, who knows me well enough to know that I don’t deserve a woman that wonderful, tells me she must have been pretending."
"We saw something was happening, my sister and I. We thought it was some kind of secret affair, his first time in love. In a way, it was."
"This isn’t about him. It isn’t about her. It isn’t about Eamonn. Perhaps I don’t ask your advice anymore because your political mind isn’t as sharp as it was."
"Those who can, do. Those who can’t, go online."
"By god, yes, he did! He thumped his hand on the desk, practicing, wondered if "by god" was a good idea, as a head rolled in the desert sand."
"For a moment they are two lovers in a park, under an ancient tree, sun-dappled, beautiful, and at peace."