Susan Abulhawa

Always" is a good word to believe in.

— Susan Abulhawa

Amal, I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow, parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell.

— Susan Abulhawa

Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand.

— Susan Abulhawa

Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?

— Susan Abulhawa

How fate is stubborn and holds to habit.

— Susan Abulhawa

I feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power.

— Susan Abulhawa

I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity... On September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father's life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and everybody they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved.

— Susan Abulhawa

I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her.

— Susan Abulhawa

I loved her in spite of myself. I loved her immeasurably. Infinitely. And I feared that love as much as I feared my own fury at the world.

— Susan Abulhawa

Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.

— Susan Abulhawa