Top 150 Amal El-Mohtar Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There were some problems only coffee and ice cream could fix.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

2. “Start a stone rolling, so in three centuries you’ll have an avalanche.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

3. “How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol horde got bored?”

— Amal El-Mohtar

4. “I want to meet you in every place I have loved.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

5. “I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

6. “But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

7. “Hunger, Red – to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth – is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

8. “But we’re all deviant in our different ways.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

9. “I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

10. “At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

11. “I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the deapths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up – and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

12. “Your mission objective’s in another castle.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

13. “Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

14. “It is difficult – it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask Do I have you still, when they end a letter with Yours, mean it in any substantive way.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

15. “Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

16. “Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

17. “Adventure works in any strand – it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

18. “It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You’re different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

19. “So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

20. “And everyone is alive, somewhere in time.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

21. “I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

22. “There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never – and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

23. “I would have fought you forever. I would have wrestled you through time. I would have turned you, and been turned.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

24. “You are yourself, and so remain, as I remain.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

25. “Funny how we always think of knights as fighting dragons, when in fact they work for them.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

26. “A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

27. “Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

28. “Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning – poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do. What’s supple, whipping, soft and fresh grows hard, grows armor. If I could touch you, put my finger into your temple and sink you into me the way Garden does – perhaps then. But I would never.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

29. “But I am the songbird running out of air, and I must breathe.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

30. “Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so. Letters of only one word. Letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair. Letters that will bite you. Letters that will mark you. I’ll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp. I’ll write you by shark’s tooth and scallop shell.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

31. “I wish sometimes I could be less fierce with you. No- I feel sometimes like I ought to want to be less fierce with you.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

32. “Red rarely sleeps, but when she does, she lies still, eyes closed in the dark, and lets herself see lapis, taste iris petals and ice, hear a blue jay’s shriek. She collects blues and keeps them.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

33. “PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

34. “Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning – poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do. What’s supple, whipping, soft, and fresh grows hard, grows armor.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

35. “I wonder what of me there is in you.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

36. “Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

37. “I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

38. “I am sad because I love you, because I love you so much, and because I am not a bee to buzz with you lightly. I am not a flower, not a tree, not a rain-hewn stone. I am not a storm or a cresting wave, not a thorn or a vine. I am not the sun stinging the water, not the moon on the snow. I am not a star in the dark. I am not the dew-wet wind, not the cloud-stained dawn. I am only a girl, a small, plain girl, a girl who must smear her lips in honey to be found sweet.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

39. “The short answer: no. The longer answer: I don’t think so?”

— Amal El-Mohtar

40. “She cannot stop herself from reaching out, from trying with a touch to say, I’m here. Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they’ll mistake embrace for strangulation.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

41. “Red, when I think of this seed in your mouth I imagine having placed it there myself, my fingers on your lips.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

42. “Atlantis sinks. Serves it right.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

43. “Perhaps survival is its own form of torture.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

44. “Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

45. “It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. My viney-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it’s nothing so simple, any more than a letter’s reply is its opposite. But which egg preceded what platypus? The ends don’t always resemble our means.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

46. “It’s not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It’s that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it’s as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

47. “Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

48. “Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

49. “Like your victory, love spreads back through time. It claims our earliest association, our battles and losses. Assassinations become assignations.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

50. “There is no mono-we; there are many usses. The usses change and interleave.”

— Amal El-Mohtar