Map Of Salt And Stars Quotes

I am a woman and a warrior. If you think I can't be both, you've been lied to.

The most important places on a map are the places we haven't been yet

Don't forget,' he says, and Abu Sayeed looks up while he translates, holding the words back a little, 'stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It's living that hurts us.

Stories are powerful, but gather too many of the words of others in your heart and they will drown out your own. Remember that

Every place you go becomes a part of you. But none more so than home.

But safety is not about never having bad things happen to you. It's about knowing that the bad things can't separate us from each other.

God smiles through the cracks in broken things.

Like most people, the name history gave them isn't what they call themselves.

People think that stories can be walled off, kept outside and separate. They can’t. Stories are inside you

I am the dust of stars inhaled.

You are the stories you tell yourself.

I know God heard them both the same at the end, that he loved them both equally even though their prayers were different.

the story often matters less than the telling

Stones don't have to be whole to be lovely," he says. "Even cracked ones can be polished and set. Small diamonds, if they are clear and well cut, can be more valuable than big ones with impurities. Listen," he says. Sometimes the brightest stars shine brightest, no?

Wealth is no substitute for belonging

My whole life, Mama and Baba celebrated two religions' worth of holidays—Christmas, Eid al-Fitr, Easter. It used to make me wonder whether the most important things we see in God are really in each other.

Every place you go becomes a part of you.

New York?" Itto looks down at me. "You may be American, but you are still Syrian." I rub the camel's coarse hair with my palms. "How?" "A person ca be two things at the same time," Itto says. "The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood.

There is a goodness in the world that got me through, that taught me it's important to know who you are.

He said, ‘People don’t get lost on the outside. They get lost on the inside. Why are there no maps of that?’ 

I ask, 'Do you think there's a place in the world where nobody has ever put their feet?' 'I think there are more of them than the other way around,' Mama says.

Perhaps the story simply goes on and on. Time rises and falls like an ever-breathing lung. The road comes and goes and suffering with it. But the generations of men, some kind and some cruel, go on and on beneath the stars.

In the pockets of my heart without any words, I want to believe.

Last night was too dark for stars,' I say. 'No, little cloud.' Abu Sayeed lifts my chin with his finger. 'If anything, the darker the night, the brighter they shine.

She had thought the open sea would be flat, like a mirror or a coin. But it had colors and shapes, turning green or black under approaching storm. Sometimes it was red and purple and silver and white gold. It had sharp hedges. It had its tempers, its blue spells, its fits of laughter

Sometimes the smallest stars shine brightest, no?

He told Rawiya to be careful of words. "Stories are powerful," he said, "but gather too many words of others in your heart, and they will drown out your own.

But once you’ve heard too many voices, you start to forget which one is your own

Nobody can love the stars and hurt people. They just can't.

But as long as you're alive,' she says, 'you have a voice. You're the one who has to hear it.

Every place you go becomes a part of you.” “But none more so than home.

You have to weave two stories together to tell them both right.

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

A person can be two things at the same time,' Itto says. 'The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood.

My name is a song I sing myself to remind me of my mothers voice. My name does not bend to your tongue, does not stop at your borders. My name is not a flight risk. I sing my name to remind me of a time where our language was in our blood. A time when our mothers were in our hair, a time when vowels came from the same deep place as laughter, and the pit of thirst was not so wide. Oh beloved, I walk the gauntlet of life barefoot and bound, clawing at the hills for the voice I left at the house where my mother and her own were born. I gather words like stones to feed my children, they thirst for words that sound like the shape of their eyes. Where oh beloved, where will I find such words?

New York?" Itto looks down at me. "You may be American, but you are still Syrian." I rub the camel's coarse hair with my palms. "How?" "A person can be two things at the same time," Itto says. "The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood.

Abu Sayeed says, 'Sometimes it takes years to understand what Allah wants us to know.' I try to raise an eyebrow, but both go up. 'And he just expects us to wait?' Abu Sayeed smiles. 'Little cloud,' he says, 'that's what faith is.

And that's when I start thinking about God. I wonder, how is God not torn up about the terrible things in the world? If he or she or they see every single one, then how is God not so sad that he can't watch anymore? If life is one long newsreel, why does she still read the headlines? Why doesn't God look away

You are the stories you tell yourself,

The salt breeze pours black water into me. It sinks deep, into a place I can’t name, a place I can’t chart.

No one is like everybody else.” Abu Sayeed taps the tips of his fingers to the railing. “All the stars are different, but when you look up, you see them just the same.

Borders are nothing to words and blood.

Stories are powerful,” he said, “but gather too many of the words of others in your heart, and they will drown out your own. Remember that.

it’s important to know who you are. You can get lost.” Huda leans over and kisses the top of my head. “You have to listen to your own voice.

The elegant figures of the constellations spun above them, driven by the wheel of the heavens.

The sudden shock of safety makes me feel like I’m going to die from my heart hammering its relief into my chest.

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

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

We rarely know,' Khaldun said, 'when we try to do good, if the outcomes of our actions will actually be good.' He laughed to himself. 'Perhaps God plans it that way, to teach us the the planning is best left to him.

I listen to them talk in a language I've never heard before. I don't have to understand everything. The blue-violet voices wind around me, protecting me from my fear. I am covered with a think rind of safety, like an orange.

— If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You’ll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddently your past is obsolete science. Old maps, disproved theories, a diorama. The moment our bodies are set to spring open. The immanence that reassembles matter passes through us then disperses into time and place: the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons. The mother who hears her child crying upstairs and suddenly feels her dress wet with milk. Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew before we were loved there, the places left fallow when we’re born, waiting for experience to find its way into us. The night crossing, on deck in the dark car. On the beach wehre night reshaped your face. In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet, moss like velvet spread over splintered forms. The instant spray freezes in air above the falls, a gasp of ice. We rise, hearing our names called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon an escutcheon on the shield of sky. The current that passes through us, radio waves, electric lick. The billions of photons that pass through film emulsion every second, the single submicroscopic crystal struck that becomes the phograph. We look and suddenly the world looks back. A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky. — But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate by the rear-view mirror of the moon; if we continue to reach both for salt and for the sweet white nibs of grass growing closest to earth; if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also driving through the canyon at night, all around us the hidden glow of limestone erased by darkness; if still we sish we’d waited for morning, we will know ourselves nowhere. Not in the mirrors of waves or in the corrading stream, not in the wavering glass of an apartment building, not in the looming light of night lobbies or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen or in the motel where we watched meteors from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open, turned stars to rain. We will become indigestible. Afraid of choking on fur and armour, animals will refuse the divided longings in our foreing blue flesh. — In your hands, all you’ve lost, all you’ve touched. In the angle of your head, every vow and broken vow. In your skin, every time you were disregarded, every time you were received. Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field, mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem. The branch that’s released when the bird lifts or lands. In a summer kitchen. On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.

That wondrous journey fixed in my mind the idea of a wide world, full of dangers and beautiful things. I loved that world, in spite of its crushing vastness. I loved it in spite of the terrible weight of its hope.” An oasis with a fortified outpost appeared

Sitt Shadid scoops me up in a bear hug, sweeping me into her round softness. I haven't been hugged, really hugged, in so long... But Sitt Shadid pats and rubs my back, and I relax. I reach across her wide arms, my cheek to her neck. She smells like jasmine flowers and olive soap.

Mama used to say stories were how Baba made sense of things. He had to untangle the world’s knots, she said. Now, thirty thousand feet above him, I am trying to untangle the knot he left in me. He said one day I’d tell our story back to him. But my words are wild country, and I don’t have a map.

This is the street where Saint Paul stayed, where he fled after Allah blinded him with a flash of light on the road to Damascus," Mama says. "The street where the Lord sent Ananias to give Paul back his sight.' 'Why did God blind him?' I asked. Abu Sayeed says, 'Maybe so he could give Paul his eyes.

But Baba used to say you should pray the most when you can't see the good in the world. And I know I should say a prayer because, after all, God is God, and today is a day we should thank him. So I try to remember the prayers Baba used to whisper in our old apartment, and the prayers Mama said when she took me to Mass, and then I add my own because I know that God listens, even if you don't get the words exactly right.

What it like to sail?" she asked. His gaze shifted, and he stared into the distance. "It's freedom. Like riding a powerful horse with a gait like silk. You speed over the waves, carried on the wind, held up over an unknowable depth of water beneath you, with the entire sky above. And that sky is a different color depending on where on earth you are. There are a thousand shades of blue. You can look up and know where you are, just by the color. And the stars at night - there's indescribable beauty in the stars, like a woman's eyes, flashing, shining... And yet, they are tools, enabling navigation, a map to follow..." She stared at his profile as he spoke, at the scars that marred his brow and cheeks, the crooked line of his broken nose, the elegant, aristocratic line of his jaw, half-hidden under the shadow of stubble, and the soft, sensual curve of his mouth. She saw the sea in his eyes, smelled the wind, tasted the salt, and she felt her chest tighten with a longing to sail, to experience speed and adventure. Breathless, she felt the presence of the man in the portrait, the rogue, the bold captain. Her heart twisted as she imagined him in prison, beaten, chained, tormented to madness. He was still a prisoner, trapped inside the cage of his injured flesh, his damaged bones, his memories of unspeakable horrors. What would it take to set him free?

crate. I cry out. Deep in the

Khaldun betrachtete den Mond. "Die Leute denken manchmal, sie könnten die Geschichten aussperren, sie von sich fernhalten, Aber das ist unmöglich. Die Geschichten sind in uns." Rawiya wandte sich ihm zu. Die fühlte sich gelöst und verstanden - zum ersten Mal, seit sie von zu Hause weggegangen war. "Man besteht aus Geschichten, die man sich selbst erzählt", hörte sie sich sagen, als kennten Khaldun und sie sich schon ewig, als wäre es das Natürlichste der Welt. Khaldun nickte. "Genau." Er warf einen weißen Stein in die Luft, der kurz zwischen Wega und Horizont schwebte, bevor er wieder zu Boden fiel. "Wenn man die Geschichte der eigenen Herkunft nicht kennt, dann wird die eigene Stimme erdrückt, erstickt von den Worten anderer. Und darum, verstehst du, muss man genau auf die Grenzen seiner Geschichten achten, darauf, wo die eigene Stimme verstummt und eine fremde erklingt." Der Wind ließ die Olivenblätter rascheln, und es schien fast, als ließe er auch die Sterne erschauern. "Dann sind Geschichten aus Worten gezeichnete Landkarten der Seele", sagte Rawiya.

He told Rawiya to be careful with words. "Stories are powerful," he said, "but gather too many words of others in your heart and they will drown out your own.

God smiles through the cracks of broken things.

But you can understand more than you think, if you are willing to wait for the knowing.

He sees me but doesn't smile. I stare into him, searching for the glassy look he had under the bench—the look of someone who has locked eyes with their own death. I was right, I guess—staring at death too much can mark a person.

But nobody ever says it. Does it make it easier to live with loss if you don't name it? Or is that something you do as a mercy for other people?

I wonder if almost can cost you as much as did, if the real wound is the moment you understand you can do nothing.

I left my tears behind when I left home. It's easier to laugh, since crying doesn't fix a limp. And life continues just the same, doesn't it, even with one leg?

Introduction The Map of Salt and Stars is the story of Nour, a Syrian American girl reeling from the recent loss of her beloved Baba (father) to cancer. After returning to Syria before the war breaks out, Nour and her family then must flee across the Middle East and North Africa in a desperate and dangerous search for safety. Her journey intertwines with the story of Rawiya and the legendary mapmaker al-Idrisi who made the same journey nine hundred years before in their quest to map the world. This rich, moving,

Mama used to say stories were how Baba made sense of things. He had to untangle the world’s knots, she said.

I don't have dreams anymore, not real ones, not since the bomb fell on our house. The dreams I've got, I don't want to call them dreams. In the dark hours between sleeping and waking, I am screaming and screaming, but nobody hears me, not even myself.

If you don’t know the tale of where you come from,” he said, “the words of others can overwhelm and drown out your own. So, you see, you must keep careful track of the borders of your stories, where your voice ends and another’s begins.” The wind rustled the olive leaves, seeming to shake the stars. “Then stories map the soul,” Rawiya said, “in the guise of words.

Does it make it easier to live with loss if you don’t name it? Or is that something you do as a mercy for other people?

I wonder if almost can cost you as much as did, if the real wound is the moment you understand that you can do nothing.

If a language or a story or a map can be used to give people a voice or to take it away, only our own words can guide us home.

I think my interest in science and my interest in writing stem from the same place, which is a desire to know why the world is the way it is. Scientific inquiry offers one set of explanations, and writing, by examining the emotional reality of the human condition, offers another.

Salt symbolizes several related themes in the book, including grief and healing from it, not only in terms of the sea’s salt but also the way that salt occurs as an imperfection in precious stones. For me, this symbolizes life’s traumas that, on the one hand, can be “polished” from us (healed) by the love of family, community, belonging—but also, on the other hand, the losses and pains of life that we have no choice but to endure. In its own way, grief and healing make us the precious stones that we are.

I think young or child narrators allow us to see the absurdity, terror, or joy in certain situations much more clearly because they don’t try to rationalize the world the way that adults do. They observe things and can hold contradictions without trying to explain them away.

In Arabic, Ceuta is Sabta,” she says. “It comes from the Latin septum, meaning seven.” “Why?” “Because the city is built on seven hills.

stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It’s living that hurts us.

Her fingers hovered over a deep crack in the ravaged stone, like an old scar. It was a noble thing, she thought, to seek beauty in a calloused world.

It seemed like the only voice Mama had left spoke in Arabic. Even when the neighbor ladies brought casseroles and white carnations, Mama swallowed her words. How come people only ever have one language for grief?

I miss home with an angry hunger, even though home is an imaginary place now.

Maybe we're marked," she says, "but we made it." I lower my eyes to the missing city on Mama's map. "Poems aren't enough." "I know." Zahra takes my face in her hands. Dust has collected in the cracks in her lips and over the bruised, delicate skin under her eyes. In the dark, she has been crying. "But as long as you're alive," she says, "you have a voice. You're the one who has to hear it.

I don’t understand why we were shelled.” Mama speaks soft, like she thinks we’re all asleep, like she’s afraid to wake us. Abu Sayeed says nothing at first. The car’s tires hum. The engine clacks and complains. “We may never understand,” he replies, just as quiet. “In times like these, it’s the small people who suffer.

For every poet knows that the sea herself has never loved, beloved, and she is thick with our tears. Only the desert knows what love is. Only the desert opens herself when the rains come, breathing in our pain, breathing out acacia and tamarisk and flowers. Only the wadi knows what it is to hold its breath. Only the wadi knows what it is to cry for joy, saying, yes, there was death here and will be death again one day, and between the two are laughter and the rhythmic breathing in of generations.

The sea has a way of showing us ourselves,” he said.

She wanted to go out and seek her fortune.

A hard red knot glues itself to my ribs like indigestion, the tangled-up knot of all the things I've loved that will be buried one day, all the things I know I am bound to forget.

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

I wouldn't mind having more scars, if you could've had less.