47 Quotes by Zeyn Joukhadar

To the night, I am a body without a past or a future, a pillar that bends light. The night doesn't know my name.

In one corner of the room are an array of small prints of the birds with gold foil laid painstakingly into individual feathers. This is not a room; it is a menagerie, and standing in the midst of it, I am one of its birds. Beside me at the door, Qamar is weeping, and I am trembling like a person in snow. One day, someone will try to explain us as they once tried to explain this, and they will not have the words.

Sami’s chest rises and falls, and I realize that, with nothing in the way, he can hug his loved ones closer to his heart.

Maybe she was right to burn my things, little wing. I love you once, and I love you still, but not all migrations end with a return home. Even memory begins to cut if you hold on to it too tight. I don't know anymore if I believe in angels and signs. Perhaps we are the miraculous creatures my mother was looking for.

I smile back in the tired way the living have of appeasing the dead. How are you supposed to smile at a ghost without feeling lonely?

We face each other, two candles flickering. Sami's sweat smells of chamomile and musk. When we dance, I am a bird shaking loose the night from its wings. I kiss him, my hand behind his jaw, his hands in my hair. He gasps into my mouth and goes soft as water, our bodies molten glass that I am shaping with my kiss, and I wonder if it's true that there is nothing on this earth that is not born of the sweet ache of flame.

If an object can become sacred by placing it on a table and calling it an altar, then who is to say we cannot sanctify our own bodies? When I touched those eggs in the nest, I understood that to love something, even oneself, is its own terrifying act of faith.

I bow my head under her hands. "I couldn't do it anymore, Teat." "My storm of storms." She tips the top of my head toward her and kisses it. "You never had to try.

I bow my head under her hands. “I couldn’t do it anymore, Teta.”“My storm of the storms.” She tips the top of my head toward her and kisses it. “You never had to try.