Zaina Arafat Quotes

I'm aware I can be exhausting - "you exist too much," my mother often told me.

In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.

Your worries are like water,' she often said. 'The moment one flows out, another floods in to fill the space.

I enjoyed occupying blurred lines. Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space.

But did it count as deception if it was done in the name of self-protection? Withholding vulnerable information was a habit born of survival. I’d been lulled into letting my guard down before, only to later regret it, the admissions used against me as I bore her wrath.

I'm devastated that you could be so careless with my heart.

When realized I'd been right about him, I didn't feel vindicated, or smug, or pleased. I felt frightened, and disturbed by the familiarity. Worse than receiving rage was the ability to detect its remnants.

Appetite is embarrassing enough; visibly trying to satiate it, utterly mortifying.

I find that I enjoy the stability even more than the highs, certainly more than the lows.

Our mutual sacrifice creates wounds that may never heal. I will carry sadness for her pain, and also for mine. In receiving love from others, it will always be hers I crave most.

When you don’t want to lose someone, it’s so tempting to deceive them.

Remember,” I said aloud, and it echoed through the empty chamber of yet another new home. “You have to make room for the real thing.

Maybe I didn't want the professor to end up like the real people in my life. The people I kept things from because I couldn't face them myself. Maybe she offered the possibility of escape.

To be a woman who desired other women seemed even worse, especially shameful and shocking in its lack of reverence for the male-centric culture. Why would you want to exclude men, the stronger, better gender, from the equation?

If my mother was Hamas—unpredictable, impulsive, and frustrated at being stifled—my father was Israel. He’d refuse to meet her most basic needs until she exploded. Then he would point at her and cry, “Look at what a monster she is, what a terror!” But never once did he consider why she had resorted to such extreme tactics, or his role in the matter.

Eventually she begins to open up and allow herself to trust me. And as she does, I find that I love this version of her, with all of its circumstance, even as the initial excitement gives way to cozy routine, with its own kind of intimacy. I find that I enjoy the stability even more than the highs, certainly more than the lows. And whenever she catches me projecting idealized versions of herself onto her, she calls me out for doing so. Throughout our relationship, she insists on remaining real.

it’s the idiosyncrasies of culture that keep me an outsider, and leave me with a persistent and pervasive sense of otherness, of non-belonging.

You don’t get to love me anymore.

I'm still in love with him." I felt like I'd been pricked with a pin, the air escaping from inside me. "Oh," I said. I hesitated before deciding to press further. "Sorry, but what are we doing, then?" "What do you mean?" she asked, as if she hadn't been there for any of it. The question crushed me in its honesty. Until then, I didn't know. I thought that the intensity of sex was correlated with love. That passion was specific and that adultery meant something was wrong.

I wonder sometimes if that day was the start of something Whether it's when I began this habit of constant seeking, of endlessly striving to earn my way back, a pattern that would send me on a misguided and self-destructive quest for love. I communicated something to my mother as I stood there smiling in a pair of men's pants, a message I didn't know I was sending her. She has always known first what I have yet to discover, has always seen it before I could.

It's a good thing I don't trust you," she had written. "Because if I did, I wouldn't have had a reason to search for confirmation.

We'd speak occasionally, sometimes in Italian, mine still rudimentary, and sometimes in Arabic. He asked why I chose to live in Italy, and not Palestine or Jordan. "I don't know," I said, feeling a pinch of guilt for being in Italy and not the West Bank, volunteering with refugees or resisting the occupation, or at least something related to my heritage. Every country outside of my own felt like a luxury, and at twenty-three, I wanted to indulge. In a way I felt I deserved to.

The notion that everyone will eventually cease to exist brings me great comfort and temporary courage.

There’s a text from Anouk: Everything all right? She knows that home is hard.

Secrets keep us sick.

I was homesick for America. I’d make a list in my journal of the things I missed most about the States: peanut butter, cow’s milk, Nickelodeon, grass, Heather, my next-door neighbor and best friend. From a distance, the U.S. seemed so beautiful, so welcoming, so easy. How could I spend a minute unhappy there? I promised myself that when I returned I would appreciate every little thing.

Acknowledgment + Approval – Mother’s Unconditional Love = Attraction. Good

Why are you looking at me so dramatically?” “I don’t know,” I say. “Isn’t that what you do when you kiss someone?

The thing about education,” her father told her the day of her college graduation, which coincided with a sharp increase in Israeli settlement construction on confiscated land in the West Bank, “is that no one can take it away from you. Everything else can be stolen. Everything else can be lost.

Eventually I would come to recognize her refrains of abstinence, of swearing off men, of committing to her vibrator, as wounded declarations of a boy-crazy woman with no plans to give up on her boyfriend, who chose to value herself in proportion to his estimation of her. I would always envy that: her unambiguous craving for men.

We are operating in accordance with a universal law dictating that whoever marries first can permissibly subject the other to indentured servitude vis-à-vis maid of honor duties, and expect enthusiastic, unfaltering compliance in return.