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

“Under the broken promises of superpowers and under the worlds indifference to spilled Arab blood.”

“Would words shatter the immensity of life and death so close to one another?”

“The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys.”

“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?”

“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 every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved.”

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

“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.”

“You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion.”

“Always" is a good word to believe in.”

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