Top 50 Susan Abulhawa Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The land and everything on it can be taken away, but no one can take away your knowledge or the degrees you earn.”

— Susan Abulhawa

2. “We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her.”

— Susan Abulhawa

3. “Love cannot reconcile with deception.”

— Susan Abulhawa

4. “For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.”

— Susan Abulhawa

5. “Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.”

— Susan Abulhawa

6. “How does one live in a world that turns away from such injustice for so long? Is this what it means to be Palestinian, Mother?”

— Susan Abulhawa

7. “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...”

— Susan Abulhawa

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

— Susan Abulhawa

9. “Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.”

— Susan Abulhawa

10. “I feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power.”

— Susan Abulhawa

11. “I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her.”

— Susan Abulhawa

12. “We’re all born with the greatest treasures we’ll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart.”

— Susan Abulhawa

13. “A persistent breeze lifted the thin curtains, fluttering a few moments of tranquility into the turbulent day.”

— Susan Abulhawa

14. “Under the broken promises of superpowers and under the worlds indifference to spilled Arab blood.”

— Susan Abulhawa

15. “Nima Shirazi is a rare voice of rational analysis and political insight that provides an eloquent counter to the pervasive absurdities that make up popular political discourse.”

— Susan Abulhawa

16. “Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand.”

— Susan Abulhawa

17. “An instant can crush a brain and change the course of life, the course of history.”

— Susan Abulhawa

18. “No matter who you are, no matter what greatness you’ve achieved in your life or what gifts you’ve given to the rest of humanity, if you criticize Israel, you must expect to become persona non grata. You should expect an utter onslaught of attacks...”

— Susan Abulhawa

19. “How can one find the first moment of love? When, in what instant, does the night’s dark sky become blue?”

— Susan Abulhawa

20. “Would words shatter the immensity of life and death so close to one another?”

— Susan Abulhawa

21. “I love you as big as the ocean and all its fishes. As big as the sky and all its birds. As big as the earth and all her trees.”

— Susan Abulhawa

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

— Susan Abulhawa

23. “Stories matter. We are composed of our stories. The human heart is made of the words we put in it. If someone ever says mean things to you, don’t let those words go into your heart, and be careful not to put mean words in other people’s hearts.”

— Susan Abulhawa

24. “She bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother, but the same beauty bloomed differently in each of them. My mother’s fairness was exquisite and untouchable, roaming alone in an abandoned castle. Khalto Bahiyas’ beauty took you in immediately. Hers was easy and disclosed hordes of laughter stolen from wherever it could be found. Gravity, sun, and time has scrawled on their faces the travails of hard work, childbirth, and destitution.”

— Susan Abulhawa

25. “Love cannot reconcile with deception. And it cannot become inured to an existence paid for with the currency of another’s misery.”

— Susan Abulhawa

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

— Susan Abulhawa

27. “We stood crying, Huda with tears, I with my mother’s silence and taut jaw. We were enfolded in each other like the last word of an epic poem we had never imagined would end. A childhood story we had lived together line by line, hand in hand, was ending and we knew it would close the moment we unraveled our arms.”

— Susan Abulhawa

28. “Words and stories washed ashore on that ancient way of the sea, and we made of them new songs. The sun came again, casting shadows that we peeled off the street to make of them new clothes.”

— Susan Abulhawa

29. “No one spoke much, as if to speak was to affirm reality. To remain silent was to accommodate the possibility that it all was merely a nightmare. The silence reached up to the cathedral ceiling and cluttered there, echoing sadness an unseen mayhem, as if too many souls were rising at once. We were existing somewhere between life and death, with neithe accepting us fully.”

— Susan Abulhawa

30. “In the sorrow of a history buried alive, the year 1948 in Palestine fell from the calendar into exile, ceasing to reckon the marching count of days, months, and years, instead becoming an infinite mist of one moment in history.”

— Susan Abulhawa

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

— Susan Abulhawa

32. “You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion.”

— Susan Abulhawa

33. “I placed my niece at her sleeping mother’s breast and watched my brother, turgid with affection, look back and forth from his wife and to his newborn daughter. In that refugee camp, which Israel would label a “breeding ground of terrorists” and “a festering den of terror,” I bore witness to a love that dwarfed immensity itself.”

— Susan Abulhawa

34. “How fate is stubborn and holds to habit.”

— Susan Abulhawa

35. “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?”

— Susan Abulhawa

36. “No one spoke much, as if to speak was to affirm reality. To remain silent was to accommodate the possibility that it all was merely a nightmare.”

— Susan Abulhawa

37. “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.”

— Susan Abulhawa

38. “How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors’ toil, without mortal consequence?”

— Susan Abulhawa

39. “How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors’ toil, without mortal consequence? Somehow that raw question had not previously penetrated the consciousness of the refugees who had become confused in the rank eternity of waiting, pining at abstract international resolutions, resistance, and struggle.”

— Susan Abulhawa

40. “It wasn’t long after that when I went into the quiet blue, that place without time, where I could soak up all the juices of life and let them run through me like a river.”

— Susan Abulhawa

41. “True darkness such as this was unattainable, for it was not merely the absence of light, but the presence of something unseeable filling every crevice of life. Not even the moon nor the brightest stars could light more than their own periphery in this blackness.”

— Susan Abulhawa

42. “At last everything was falling into place. Falling into love.”

— Susan Abulhawa

43. “It’s all about having a thread that links your years. To have another living person who just knows you. Someone who has seen you from childhood.”

— Susan Abulhawa

44. “Strange, again, I am unafraid of death. Perhaps because she knew, from the soldier’s blink, that she would live.”

— Susan Abulhawa

45. “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.”

— Susan Abulhawa

46. “Dalia surveyed the land, burnt, lifeless. She was aware of an itch just behind her left knee, and she concentrated on it but could not will herself to reach for it.”

— Susan Abulhawa

47. “Always” is a good word to believe in.”

— Susan Abulhawa

48. “They uprooted indigenous songs, and planted lies in the ground to grow a new story.”

— Susan Abulhawa

49. “It has been conquered, razed, and rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood.”

— Susan Abulhawa

50. “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.”

— Susan Abulhawa