Potent quotables
What’s meant for you will reach you even if it’s beneath two mountains, and what’s not meant for you won’t reach you even if it’s between your two lips.
There was an empty coffee cup on the corner pavement, blue-and-white cardboard, crushed and mud-stained. She caught sight of the gold letters printed on it—WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU!—and sighed. She couldn’t imagine a man coming up with that line. No, it must’ve been a woman.
She was reading, holding the book to her face like a shield, inhaling the words as if they were fueling her somehow.
Soon you’ll learn that there’s no room for love in a woman’s life. There’s only one thing you’ll need, and that’s sabr, patience.
Sometimes I think maybe happiness isn’t real, at least not for me.
It’s the loneliest people who love books the most… Sometimes I think it was the opposite of loneliness, too, like there were too many people around me, forced connections, that I needed a little isolation to think on my own, to be my own person.
Deya started to protest but found nothing to say. Sarah was right. She did have choices. What she didn’t have was enough courage to make them.
That was the real reason abuse was so common... Not only because there was no government protection, but because women were raised to believe they were worthless, shameful creatures who deserved to get beaten, who were made to depend on the men who beat them.
Hadn’t the characters in her books struggled, too? Hadn’t they stood up for themselves? Hadn’t they been weak and powerless, too? Wasn’t it true that she had as much control over her life as they had?
She decided she would rather go on living conflicted with books by her side than be tormented all alone.
Even though he was looking out toward the river, Isra could see it in his eyes: he would beat her tonight. She stared at him, hoping she was wrong, that he wouldn’t take out his anger on her. But the signs were all too familiar now. First, he’d beat her loud and hard, shaking with rage. Then he’d reach out to touch her again, only slightly softer this time, pushing himself inside her. She’d shut her eyes tight, clench her fists, and keep still in hopes she might just disappear.
What could she say? That her books had finally taught her the truth: love was not something a man could give you, and she didn’t want her daughters thinking it was? That she couldn’t let her daughters grow up hoping a man would save them? She knew she had to teach them how to love themselves, that this was the only way they had a chance at happiness. Only she didn’t see how she could when the world pressed shame into women like pillows into their faces.
If you wanted what’s best for us, you would let me go to college. You wouldn’t force me to get married to a stranger. You wouldn’t risk putting me in a situation where that man might kill me, and everyone would look the other way! How could you want that life for me?
What good is your apology if nothing has changed?
No matter what, he was going to beat her—whether she defied him or submitted, whether she spoke up or said nothing. The least she could do was stand up for her daughters. She owed them that.
Maybe her story is in here somewhere. Maybe she will finally find it. She runs her fingers along the hardcover spines, inhales the smell of old paper, searching. But then it hits her, like falling into water. I can tell my own story now, she thinks. And then she does.