The Map Of Salt And Stars Quotes
"The island of Manhattan’s got holes in it, and that’s where Baba sleeps."
"Before Baba died, we hardly ever got calls from Syria, just emails. But Mama said in an emergency, you’ve got to hear a person’s voice."
"How come people only ever have one language for grief?"
"Mama once said the city was a map of all the people who’d lived and died in it, and Baba said every map was really a story."
"Mama used to say stories were how Baba made sense of things. He had to untangle the world’s knots."
"But my words are wild country, and I don’t have a map."
"Everybody knows the story of Rawiya. They just don’t know they know it."
Remember," she said, "even Baba said that no two people tell a story quite the same.
"It’s been three months since we moved to Syria, and Mama doesn’t leave her tears on the pomegranates anymore."
"We buy pistachios and ice cream all the time."
Stories are powerful," he said, "but gather too many of the words of others in your heart, and they will drown out your own. Remember that.
"I’ve wandered into the elephant stables."
"You will always have wakeful companions in this hall."
"The rarest and most precious gem, so incredible it lacks a name."
"The whole world turns red from the screaming down the street. Sirens come from everywhere at once. The city has burst like a blister."
"Mama thanks God as she picks up our documents, the only things we have left to prove we’re a family."
"The world is ripping apart, I think, leaving pain to spread like blood through Huda’s bandages."
"The expedition fell silent. Even from far off, they could see the winged beast clinging to the roof of the citadel."
"Stories ease the pain of living, not dying."
"She smiles, lifting the hem of her skirt as we climb. Her cheeks are full, and her smile is bordered by dimples, but her skin is ashen from lack of sleep."
"The sun beat hot on the wild thyme. I trip over my feet on the curb."
"The expedition set off with Khaldun for ash-Sham, the City of Jasmine, also known as Dimashq—Damascus."
"You’ll understand one day," she says. "When you’re older."
"The old storyteller presses his forehead to the bars. He reaches out his hand and flattens his palm against them, his fingertips outstretched."
"The frescoes were bright as crushed fruit: the sumac-red fur of a bear playing an oud."
"A vault of heaven? A dome decorated with a diagram of the stars."
"The world is made of fear and wonder and light."
"The sun beats hot on the wild thyme. I trip over my feet on the curb."
"The whole hospital smells like bleach. It reminds me of the time after Baba died."
"Why didn’t I realize you can’t just super-glue a dining table back together, a house?"
"People don’t get lost on the outside. They get lost on the inside. Why are there no maps of that?"
"The fear in the city now—it’s a pity. The fear of spies. Warring factions are looking for an opening after the last caliph’s death."
"Sometimes a person dies and leaves a hole too big to fill."
"Good fathers never abandon their children, not even when they die."
"You choose what defines you. Being a refugee doesn’t have to."
"People make such beautiful things, I think, even though they destroy so much."
"We have to wait. What do you want me to do?"
"The night is closing in like a hundred invisible hands."
"No one sees the future. No one knows what’s planned. But safety is not about never having bad things happen to you. It’s about knowing that the bad things can’t separate us from each other."
"Your family still loves you, and you can get through anything if you know that."
"Some prayers go unanswered many years. The heart knows this."
"But even if God does hear our questions, what if we can’t understand the answers?"
"Somewhere, your baba is very proud of you."
"The most important places on a map are the places we haven’t been yet."
"You look so much like him. When I look at you, all I see is him."
"The world is a stone in me, heavy with Baba’s voice and the old clock tower."
"The Syria I knew is in me somewhere. And I guess it’s in you too, in its own way."
"We always go back to death-places. It’s like somebody dying opens a door, and we have to look in."
"People say lots of things to feel better."
"If life is one long newsreel, why does she still read the headlines?"
"We stayed until after dark. We walked around crunching the last of our ice cream cones. It got so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your nose. Baba said he didn’t want to go home yet. Neither did I."
"I couldn’t stand thinking she would never write me again, that I would lie on my bed with my legs up the wall, waiting for a phone call that would never come."
"I think part of me wanted to stay like that, under the upside-down basket of the dark, feeling small and scared and sacred at the same time."
"There was something about seeing Baba with his head in his hands, something new. He wasn’t my baba anymore. He was just a person, lost and bent over like everybody else."
"I knew I should have, that Baba was upset, that he was scared he had lost me. But I just stood there."
"I feel like that now, watching the sun come up over Benghazi with my back to the harbor where the night hangs, waiting to see my arms and my legs."
"I wish Huda were with us, wish I could hear her call out to me: Ya Nouri!"
"The world changes its shape in the night, one says."
"I’ve never seen a map like that," she says.
"I wonder if bad men are good sometimes, when we aren’t looking."
"Sometimes pain comes with its own sorts of blessings."
"The world changes its shape in the night."
"I wonder if the heat is making the paint melt on Mama’s map."
"I am a woman and a warrior. If you think I can’t be both, you’ve been lied to."
"Nothing is left of him except for the stories we tell."
"A person can be two things at the same time. The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood."
"Home is this. No one can take it from us."
"The desert becomes familiar, a face decorated with the arched noses of rocks, the lips of dunes, the hairlines of green patches dotted with eucalyptus."
"The small ones always have the biggest mouths on them."
"Things can’t be like they were, but I’m still your Huppy."
"I wonder if all maps are stories. Or all stories are maps. Maybe we’re maps too. Our whole bodies."
"Our heritage. Our stories. They call us Berber, from ‘barbarian.’ But Amazigh means ‘free man.’ Did you know this? No one can take our freedom from us. No one can take our land or our names from our hearts."
"The map’s fabric is the same pink-gray color as Huda’s roses."
"But as long as you’re alive, you have a voice. You’re the one who has to hear it."