47 Quotes by Zeyn Joukhadar

We watch the kites circling, and I imagine them setting fire to the way my life has been before this moment. I imagine the smoke reshaping me. I reimagine myself as my first work, the art that comes before all other art I might one day make, the work I fashion only for myself and for those who have the eyes to see it.

Maybe it's true that we become what we love most, that we exalt the nameless by losing ourselves in it.

The brain, like any organ in the body, knows wordless truths, knows health from sickness, knows how to recognize self from other. Maybe it's true that the self is every artist's first obsession, that every other subject--a plate of oranges, a mountain, a lover's face-- is just a recognition of the self in another form.

This is what you have faith in?" Ilyas turned to me in the dark. "I have faith in things that are beautiful and good," he said, "and don't tell other people what they need to do to be loved.

I've become just like the white boys at middle-school dances: the boys by the wall, earthbound boys, wing-severed boys with stiff bodies. There is nothing behind the door in my chest that should uncage the kind of feminine softness I should have, the kind you told me would settle into my chest and my hips. It never did.

I'm not the only one, of course. The last time I saw one of my male classmates from art school, he consoled me about my artist's block by telling me how few of the girls we studied with were painting anymore. It one one thing to have a body; it is another thing to struggle under the menacing weight of its meaning.

My parents spoke as though Amrika, with her fair-haired men and her torch, would cast a spell and transform us all into charmed, unrecognizable creatures.

Tell me something beautiful," you said. I opened my mouth and out came the only thing that I had ever known to be as beautiful as it was true: that I had once met a woman who knew how to fly.

I decided to go, too, and I know it's the right decision because as soon as I said it, I felt a little braver, a little more like Khalti.