47 Quotes by Zeyn Joukhadar

How many Polaroids are there of places that no longer exist?

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.

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.

Stones don’t have to be whole to be lovely.

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.

Maybe, like Mama said, we are all born with a wound that needs fixing.

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.

We’re made from clay, after all, aren’t we, and underground springs and threads of copper in our veins. When they ask me where I’m from, they aren’t asking for the city of my birth certificate, but whose earth is in my blood.

In my experience,′ he said, ’it is a noble person who loves the stars.