We became who we became because of what wasn’t there.

And that’s what love is, I suppose. The one thing that is most worth hoping for, and the one thing that’s most surprising when it lands. Because it’s better. It exceeds hope, makes hope nearsighted.

He loved me, despite me – which, actually, when you think about it, means because of me.

Happiness is an act of faith.

After that, she talked about the food. The spices. How they used to make lentils and rice on Thursday and fried fish on Friday and how they prepared sheets of tomato paste or apricots and left them to dry on the rooftops.

I will take care of everything," I whispered, as if words might be enough to lure him back. I promised him that I'd open an Iraqi pastry shop. I lied."We will sell the vanilla cake with pomegranate sauce, the date truffles, the cardamom cookies, the sharkrlama." All the things he loved. Things we had served night after night at the restaurant.

I had a lump in my throat the size of a bundt cake pan.

My mother said my father walked out that time, the final time, because she had spent eight hundred dollars at the French Hen in Manchester- she'd special-ordered lox and toro and paddlefish caviar- and he wanted her to be miserable.

Writers are never fully present because they’re always imagining a different version of the way things are happening; imagining the past in a different way, imagining the present in a different way, imagining the future in a different way.

We didn't have wooden stakes in the ground. We didn't have burning brushwood either. We didn't have fish from the Tigris or the Euphrates. We did have fresh red snapper from Citarella, which I butterflied down the back; tamarind paste from Fairway; hand-skimmed olive oil from Tunisia. We had a small fire when Victoria's sleeve brushed past the stove. And when I threw a glass of water at her, we had a fit of laughter so overpowering that I had to help her into a chair.