Top 150 Amal El-Mohtar Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “They would make this war, she thinks, if there were not a war already made for them to make.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

52. “Myth and legend give way to history, which gives way again to myth, like curtains parting and meeting again on either side of a performance. xxx All good stories travel from the outside in.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

53. “I keep turning away from speaking of your letter. I feel – to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

54. “I think we can safely deduce that this is a spacio-temporal issue and not a weird skin condition.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

55. “You must dwell, says Garden, within time to shift it in lasting ways; play a slow game, but win.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

56. “I shudder to imagine an equal and opposite incursion – may causality forbid Commandant ever dispatch me to one of your viny-hivey elfworlds, profusely floral, all arcing elder trees, neural pollen, bees gathering memories from eyes and tongue, honey libraries dripping knowledge from the comb. I harbor no illusions I’d succeed. You would find me in an instant, crush me faster – I’d walk a swath of rot through your verdancy, no matter how light I tried to step. I have a Cherenkov-green thumb.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

57. “Further,” Blue adds, stepping lightly towards the box, making to lift it into the heavy bag next to it, “Ontario sucks. As the prophets say.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

58. “Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers’ tips, between the lines of her palms.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

59. “She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

60. “Thus we braid Strand 6 to Strand 9, and our glorious crystal future shines so bright I gotta wear shades, as the prophets say.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

61. “Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

62. “Have you ever tasted rose hips, in tea or jam? A tart sourness that cleans the teeth, refreshes, smells like a good morning. A mash of rose hips and mint keeps me steepling my fingers all day long, to keep those scents in my head. Sumac, too – I think you might like sumac.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

63. “Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

64. “I love you, Blue. Have I always? Haven’t I?”

— Amal El-Mohtar

65. “So in this letter I am yours. Not Garden’s, not your mission’s, but yours, alone. I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as I review your words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours. Still, I suspect you will appreciate the token.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

66. “It’s so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

67. “My viny-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

68. “I like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which I think of you. It feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

69. “Red likes to feel. It is a fetish. Now she feels fear. And eagerness.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

70. “I want to tell you something about myself. Something true, or nothing at all.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

71. “She is, briefly, Blue, alone with Red, and together.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

72. “They conspire. History makes common cause with the enemy.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

73. “Are you trying to recruit me, dear Cochineal? “And then we’d be at each other’s throats even more.” Oh, petal. You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

74. “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

75. “I’ve learned to take warning from delight.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

76. “Do you laugh, sea foam? Do you smile, ice, and observe your triumph with an angel’s remove? Sapphire-flamed phoenix, risen, do you command me once again to look upon your works and despair?”

— Amal El-Mohtar

77. “And this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

78. “You’ve always been the hunger at the heart of me, Red – my teeth, my claws, my poisoned apple.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

79. “Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

80. “You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

81. “London Next – the same day, month, year, but one strand over – is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy – this is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

82. “She seeds the Strand 9 Amazon Basin with defanged versions of European superbugs ten centuries before first contact, and when conquistadors arrive, they face locals by the millions, strong, thriving communities that won’t perish by mere contact with the world across the waves.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

83. “How to say what it means to me, that I might have taught you this – shared it, somehow, infected you with it. I hope it isn’t a burden at the same time that I want you seared by it. I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them, one letter-seed at a time.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

84. “I dream of you. I keep more of you inside my mind, my physical, personal, squishy mind, than I keep of any other world or time.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

85. “So in this letter I am yours.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

86. “This feels like being cut off, again, in the strangest way – feels like teetering on the brink of something that will unmake me.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

87. “As she knots and thinks to herself, she decides she would describe it using terms from Go: You place each stone expecting it may do many things. A strike is also a block is also a different strike. A confession is also a dare is also a compulsion.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

88. “Red screams at the sky. She calls Beings in which she does not believe to account. She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

89. “I dance to you in a body built for sweetness, a body that tears itself apart in defense of what it loves. This letter will sting you when it’s done. Let it, and read a postscript in its death throes.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

90. “She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

91. “You asked me to tell truths. I have. What do I want? Understanding. Exchange. Victory. A game – hiding and discovery. You’re a swift opponent, Blue. You play long odds. You run the table. If we’re to be at war, we might as well entertain one another.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

92. “You ask if I’ve been lonely. I hardly know how to answer. I have observed friendship as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate endeavour, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

93. “Most strands lack Atlantis altogether, know the place only through dreams and mad poets’ madder whispers.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

94. “Her limbs inform her that they ache where they clutch this ancient trunk above an unfathomable drop.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

95. “You’ve always been the hunger at the heart of me, Red–my teeth, my claws, my poisoned apple. Under the spreading chestnut tree, I made you and you made me.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

96. “She is useless to the war effort like this. Might as well shovel snow. But she is a hero, and heroes can shovel snow if they like.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

97. “I feel almost invincible in our battles’ wake: a kind of Achilles, fleet footed and light of touch. Only in this nonexistent place our letters weave do I feel weak.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

98. “My memories of you spread through millennia, and each highlights you in motion.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

99. “There is a small hill from which I can watch the sun set over the Outaouais River; every evening I see a red sky bleed over blue water and think of us. Have you ever watched this kind of sunset? The colours don’t blend: the redder the sky the bluer the water, as we tilt away from the sun.”

— Amal El-Mohtar

100. “Will you respond, establishing complicity, continuing our self-destructive paper trail, just to get in the last word? Will you cut off, leaving my note to spin its fractal math inside you? I wonder which I’d rather.”

— Amal El-Mohtar