Susan Abulhawa Quotes

We're all born with the greatest treasures we'll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart.

For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.

They had bombed and burned,killed and maimed,plundered and looted.Now they had come to claim the land.

We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her

Love cannot reconcile with deception

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.

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

An instant can crush a brain and change the course of life, the course of history.

the reverse side of love is unbearable loss.

The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has cometo live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoidingyou, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stonesweep. And the way we love is no exception

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.

The land and everything on it can be taken away, but no one can take away your knowledge or the degrees you earn

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

No matter who you are, no matter what greatness you've achieved in your life or what gifts you've given to the rest of humanity, if you criticize Israel, you must expect to become persona non grata. You should expect an utter onslaught of attacks.

How can one find the first moment of love? When, in what instant, does the night's dark sky become blue?