Against The Loveless World Quotes

No one had ever kissed me with such love, and it occurred to me that happiness can reach such depths that it becomes something akin to grief.

For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were, to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.

I colonized the colonizer’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.

I think in saying 'loved each other,' Baldwin doesn't just mean the living. To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, and joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from..

I remember the shock of it, then questioning how it is that death can be life’s only assurance and yet also its greatest, most devastating surprise.

This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.

If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save. But we are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country--to say nothing of what goes on in the rest of the world--and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told. Our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them; our opulence is so pervasive that people who are afraid to lose whatever they think they have persuade themselves of the truth of a lie, and help disseminate it; and God help the innocent here, that man or womn who simply wants to love, and be loved. Unless this would-be lover is able to replace his or her backbone with a steel rod, he or she is doomed. This is no place for love. I know that I am now expected to make a bow in the direction of those millions of unremarked, happy marriages all over America, but I am unable honestly to do so because I find nothing whatever in our moral and social climate--and I am now thinking particularly of the state of our children--to bear witness to their existence. I suspect that when we refer to these happy and so marvelously invisible people, we are simply being nostalgic concerning the happy, simple, God-fearing life which we imagine ourselves once to have lived. In any case, wherever love is found, it unfailingly makes itself felt in the individual, the personal authority of the individual. Judged by this standard, we are a loveless nation. The best that can be said is that some of us are struggling. And what we are struggling against is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live.

It seemed to me that fate was inherited, like eye color. I wondered if she had felt the same disorientation that now ruled my days. Had it been all she could think about—the incomprehensibility of forced, permanent displacement?

But I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.

Palestinians learned the first time in 1948 that leaving to save your life meant you would lose everything and could never go back.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

I know in alone here. I’m not delusional. But the way memory animates the past is more real than the present.

We’re all part of each other. When you see what the Americans have done to us, what they’ve done to Iraq, Libya… And it breaks our hearts, all of us.

To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, and joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from

Most of these women had ordinary lives, but life pulled the extraordinary out of them.

I wanted to describe to him how the emotional intimacy growing between us was shattering my heart in the most life-affirming ways, but I didn’t have the right words, except to say that I loved him, which wasn’t nearly enough. We spent that night, and every night together after, in a closeness I had never known, or even thought possible with another person. I was happy. Truly content. Drifting to sleep in Bilal’s arms, I thought about the hills beyond the terrace. Soon wild plum, peach, pear, fig, medlar, mulberry, date, and almond trees would bloom.

The continuity of these traditions helped bridge the spaces between dislocation and the home I had forged in my birthright homeland, but I knew I could never again be complete in one place. This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere. To remain in one place meant tearing one’s limbs from another.

It amazed me to see how quickly they got comfortable in the new apartment and settled into a routine, as if their lives had simply been excised and replaced elsewhere, intact, with just a dusting of grief they shook off before returning to the business of living. Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.

She was the first woman I met who truly hated men. She said it openly and without apology. I found her persuasive

For the ones we love, nothing is ever trouble, and everything is never enough.

and Israelis had elected Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Beirut, as their prime minister, and his brutal legacy was already being felt.

Fall in love if you must, but remember cruelty always has a dick.

To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you.

No therapist or clergy can substitute for the confidence of a whore, because whores have no voice in the world, no avenue to daylight, and that makes us the most reliable custodians of secrets and truth.

Their deceit, once planted in the public imagination—like the epic fabrication of a Jewish nation returning to its homeland—had grown into a living, breathing narrative that shaped lives as if it were truth.

You get one more day of self-pity, but tomorrow morning you get out of bed, clear your head, and decide how you will live. It is that simple. You make that one decision. Then you make another, and another. There are no forces holding you in this pathetic state. You are young, beautiful, and healthy. You have a home, family, and friends. Start from there.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

I think he just means that we should fortify ourselves with love when we approach them. It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.

Baldwin and Kanafani were contemporaries thousands of miles apart, who never met but lived parallel lives. They wrote with the same passion, the same irreverence and defiance; with overlapping wounds and bottomless love for their people. Baldwin was forced into self-imposed exile and Kanafani was assassinated by Israel. To be committed is to be in danger.

Zionist entity—that’s how people referred to Israel, like it’ll go away if we don’t say the name.

It means fate lacks imagination,

To remain in one place meant tearing one’s limbs from another.

We made love many times before we made love. Our bodies often melted together when he read to me, when we kissed, talked, hugged, undressed, bathed, slept.

From him I learned who those legislating morality and pretending to be more virtuous than the rest of us really are.

Abandoning the imposition of a calendar helped me understand that time isn’t real; it has no logic in the absence of hope or anticipation.

Are you going to pump your special phthalates into their water?” “Shhh.” He put a finger to his lips and came close. “Don’t say that out loud. But, yes, that’s what I’m going to do.

They’d never imagined guerrilla resistance with such unconventional weaponry as crossbows and hornet spray. Some of the arrowheads were poisoned with plant oils, all of which were found in Ghassan’s home.

A new sort of grief burrows into me, a cloistered, unreachable, immutable ache. I can’t see, smell, or embrace it. It just lodges in me, taking up space, a thing within a prison within a prisoner within the Cube.

Blue whales subsist on krill. Krill is a Norwegian word. I wonder what it’s like to be Norwegian. What’s it like to be a whale? To live in water. To be the biggest creature on earth, still vulnerable to a small man’s greed.

O God, my Lord, destroy the Jews for making us endless refugees and condemn Yasser Arafat for causing another Palestinian exodus. O my Lord, burn the Americans and burn the Jews. They are behind all these wars.” “Amen,” Mama said.

We made a mezze dinner with the fresh bread we had baked earlier—fried tomatoes, garlic and zucchini from the garden, boiled eggs, the last of our Nabulsi cheese, zeit-o-za’atar, labneh with olive oil and paprika, sliced cucumber, beets, and pickled vegetables.

Abandoning the imposition of a calendar helped me understand that time isn’t real; it has no logic in the absence of hope or anticipation. The Cube is thus devoid of time. It contains, instead, a yawning stretch of something unnamed, without present, future, or past, which I fill with imagined or remembered life.

It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.

Feelings erode in here. Memories wear off. All that’s left are facts without the emotion that once accompanied them. I don’t cry in this place. There isn’t room enough for the heart to move. There are no winds to rustle it. Silence here is not the absence of sound, but the presence of a dense, unshakable stillness. Like dark matter in space, silence here is a living force that slides into all corners and seams. I have come to depend on it.

Music is like spoken language, inextricable from its culture. If you don't learn a language early in life, its words will forever come out wrinkled and accented by another world, no matter how well you memorize or love the vocabulary, grammar, and cadences of a new language. This is why foreign "belly dancers" have always bothered me. The use of our music as a prop to wiggle and shimmy and jump around offends me. Eastern music is the soundtrack of me..

Blue whales are the largest creatures ever to roam our planet, as long as thirty meters and weighing up to 173,000 kilograms. They have intricate social lives and complex languages. Hunted to near extinction. Less than a few thousand remained before whaling restrictions were introduced, but whalers continue to serve a black market, and these majestic creatures might disappear from the world. Blue whales subsist on krill. Krill is a Norwegian word. I wonder what it’s like to be Norwegian. What’s it like to be a whale? To live in water. To be the biggest creature on earth, still vulnerable to a small man’s greed.

Is not the history of the world no more than a record of violence and death cut in stone? It is a terrible, lonely, loveless thing to know it, and see—as I realize now the doctor saw before me—that the only justification is in the attempt, not in the achievement, for there is no achievement; to know that each day may dawn fair or fairer than the last, and end as horribly wretched or more. Can those things that drive men to their ends be ever stilled, or will they only thrive and grow and yet more hideously clash one against the other so long as man himself is not stilled? Can I look out at these cold stars in this black sky and believe in my heart of hearts that it was this sky that hung over Bethlehem, and that a star such as these stars glittered there to raise men’s hearts to false hopes forever?

The lyrics of Um Kulthum, the plaint of a ney, the melody of a qanuun or the rasp of an oud are the sounds of my life.

Although Kuwait never allowed us more than temporary residency—making it clear we were always guests—Palestinians prospered and had a major hand in building Kuwait as the world knows it now.

I didn’t appreciate her speaking ill about Kuwaitis; but for her, everything came down to being Palestinian, and the whole world was out to get us.

I’m not delusional. But the way memory animates the past is more real than the present.

In the end, he had confessed to the murder of two Israeli soldiers, blowing up a military supply warehouse a month earlier, and plotting to carry out attacks on civilians.

Still laughing, Fifi said, “Just drink it. Don’t pretend here. We know all you Palestinians drink alcohol.

The toilet, bidet, gold faucets, marble tile, Jacuzzi tub, and glass shower floated around me as I rushed to the toilet, vomiting the acid of scotch and mixed nuts.

We endure and wait, and cater to the whims of men, because sometimes our lives are at stake… until we get even.

Abu Moathe was one of the rare mitkawteen, Palestinians who had been granted Kuwaiti citizenship,

Most mitkawteen were intellectuals and high-born merchants who took pride in being Palestinian.

He agreed never to strike my face or neck where marks would be visible, as long as he could bruise the rest of me.

Iraq arrested five thousand Palestinians for joining the Kuwaiti resistance.

We are not collaborators. You’re making a mistake. We’ve been in this country for twenty-five years. We love Kuwait.

Kuwait would not allow Palestinians to get new car plates.

In menstrual blood I wrote: Long live Saddam Hussein, and in feces: Israel is shit.

I tried to find work, but unemployment in Jordan was already high before half a million Palestinians displaced from Kuwait descended on the country.

Yasser Arafat got a Nobel Prize,

Unlike Kuwait, where neighborhoods were segregated by class and nationality, the rich and poor lived cheek-by-jowl in Jordan. Not for some egalitarian ideals, but for the convenience of the rich.

Kuwait was all concrete and sand.

Ordinarily I would use white silk for this thobe, but I found this gorgeous terra-cotta silk that harkens to Jericho.

After five months of pumping phthalates into the pipe, an article appeared in a local Hebrew-language newspaper describing strange symptoms among the residents.

The settlers’ health problems persisted, however, because we went back to sabotaging the pipe when it was safe to do so.

Tha’ir Hamad was a twenty-two-year-old lone Palestinian sniper who’d carried out an attack on soldiers at a checkpoint at the beginning of the Second Intifada.

His name became synonymous with precision and expert marksmanship.

All those boys and about ten more came up on them pointing aerosol cans—it turned out to be hornet spray—and released it in streams on their faces. The soldiers started scampering back when all these arrows—like American Indian arrows!—rained down on them. Praise God! Praise God! God bless our warriors! God bless the resistance. God protect them. Allahu akbar.

When you can’t leave the house and there’s little food or water, fucking is all there is.

Bilal took in a long breath. “I need to say that again. Give up anything you want. Make shit up if you have to. But never, ever the underground.

Two elderly Egyptian women walk me down a dark corridor. They look familiar and I remember where I’ve seen them before. “No.” I tell them I don’t want to abort my child. But they just laugh and say, “We’ve already been paid.

The clock read 3:48 a.m. It was Friday, the day we usually slept in.

zeekaroon and zokheret.

Eventually I confessed to helping sabotage the water pipe.

I started with “Yumma Mweil elHawa,” to set the mood. The judge admonished me.

Any leader they don’t like is a Hitler.

Bilal’s coordinated assaults on their military killed twenty-four Israeli soldiers and wounded twelve on that stunning day.

The first attack had been a decoy to divert resources from subsequent ones. It occurred at a remote checkpoint. Two soldiers were killed with a torrent of arrows from three comrades

The automatic weapons and hand grenades seized from the dead soldiers were used to attack the Israeli reinforcements.

They used what working guns they had obtained from the Russian smugglers. As Israeli soldiers began to retreat inside the fortified terminal, Ghassan’s brigade descended upon them.

Samer remained in Moscow, where he continued to run the website with Jehad, and expanded it to multiple networks.

but it was not long before the resistance regrouped and a Third Intifada ignited, even capturing two Israeli soldiers and holding the remains of two dead ones. It happened not so long ago. The underground city has remained our secret.

It wasn’t the first time I had heard such a thing during the time it had taken for my breasts to sag and my hair to turn to ash.

I can see in the eyes of those around me that I am not the person they remember. I have no feelings on that or any other matter.

I feel color and texture transform what is dull and desiccated.

It’s the reason Kuwait let me out of prison and deported me to Iraq through Jordan,

It was terrible to be at their mercy, but thankfully Saddam still ensured free health care and social services even under American sanctions.

a US president who was the son of the president who bombed Iraq when we still lived in Kuwait. This time they reduced Babylon, that once splendid, sophisticated, ancient civilization, to nothing. They made beggars of her teachers, taxi drivers of her doctors; and they made off with her treasures and artifacts.

Americans are the devil,” she said.

I want to thank all of my other international publishers, especially Aschehoug (Norway) and Feltrinelli (Italy), who have been so good to me over the years.

We set out the hot trays of mansaf, tender lamb in spicy white yogurt broth on a bed of saffron rice, topped with roasted almonds, parsley, and pine nuts.

The ability to become vacuous was a skill I had honed over years.

God intervened, or so everyone later said.

And finally, the straw that broke my teacher’s back: Why would He really care what we eat or wear? Doesn’t He have more important things to deal with?

I told it as I tell it now. As if it were someone else’s life, something distant from me. I didn’t feel the shame, pleasure, or trauma of it. I wasn’t holding back tears. There simply were none.

Bullets and missiles, like moths, were attracted to light.