Top 40 Zeyn Joukhadar Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Zeyn Joukhadar

2. “I think to myself, It is terrifying to be visible, and then I think, I have been waiting all my life to be seen.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

3. “You are the stories you tell yourself.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

4. “Maybe she was right to burn my things, little wing. I love you once, and I love you still, but not all migrations end with a return home. Even memory begins to cut if you hold on to it too tight. I don’t know anymore if I believe in angels and signs. Perhaps we are the miraculous creatures my mother was looking for.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

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

— Zeyn Joukhadar

6. “If an object can become sacred by placing it on a table and calling it an altar, then who is to say we cannot sanctify our own bodies? When I touched those eggs in the nest, I understood that to love something, even oneself, is its own terrifying act of faith.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

7. “To the night, I am a body without a past or a future, a pillar that bends light. The night doesn’t know my name.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

8. “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.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

9. “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.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

10. “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.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

11. “The brain, like any organ in the body, knows wordless truths, knows health from sickness, knows how to recognize self from other. Maybe it’s true that the self is every artist’s first obsession, that every other subject – a plate of oranges, a mountain, a lover’s face – is just a recognition of the self in another form.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

12. “We watch the kites circling, and I imagine them setting fire to the way my life has been before this moment. I imagine the smoke reshaping me. I reimagine myself as my first work, the art that comes before all other art I might one day make, the work I fashion only for myself and for those who have the eyes to see it.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

13. “How many Polaroids are there of places that no longer exist?”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

14. “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.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

15. “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.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

16. “But as long as you’re alive,′ she says, ’you have a voice. You’re the one who has to hear it.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

17. “In one corner of the room are an array of small prints of the birds with gold foil laid painstakingly into individual feathers. This is not a room; it is a menagerie, and standing in the midst of it, I am one of its birds. Beside me at the door, Qamar is weeping, and I am trembling like a person in snow. One day, someone will try to explain us as they once tried to explain this, and they will not have the words.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

18. “Maybe it’s true that we become what we love most, that we exalt the nameless by losing ourselves in it.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

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

— Zeyn Joukhadar

20. “I smile back in the tired way the living have of appeasing the dead. How are you supposed to smile at a ghost without feeling lonely?”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

21. “Rent goes up and up and up. The family-owned boedgas keep on closing, replaced by artisanal cupcake shops and overpriced organic grocery stores whose customers hurry past the homeless and the flowers laid on street corners for Black boys shot by the cops. Some people go their whole lives in New York shutting their eyes to the fact that this city was built for the people who took this land from the Lenape.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

22. “I’m not the only one, of course. The last time I saw one of my male classmates from art school, he consoled me about my artist’s block by telling me how few of the girls we studied with were painting anymore. It one one thing to have a body; it is another thing to struggle under the menacing weight of its meaning.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

23. “Stones don’t have to be whole to be lovely.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

24. “We’re made from clay, after all, aren’t we, and underground springs and threads of copper in our veins. When they ask me where I’m from, they aren’t asking for the city of my birth certificate, but whose earth is in my blood.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

25. “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.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

26. “I wouldn’t mind having more scars, if you could’ve had less.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

27. “Nobody can love the stars and hurt people. They just can’t.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

28. “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.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

29. “We face each other, two candles flickering. Sami’s sweat smells of chamomile and musk. When we dance, I am a bird shaking loose the night from its wings. I kiss him, my hand behind his jaw, his hands in my hair. He gasps into my mouth and goes soft as water, our bodies molten glass that I am shaping with my kiss, and I wonder if it’s true that there is nothing on this earth that is not born of the sweet ache of flame.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

30. “I’ve become just like the white boys at middle-school dances: the boys by the wall, earthbound boys, wing-severed boys with stiff bodies. There is nothing behind the door in my chest that should uncage the kind of feminine softness I should have, the kind you told me would settle into my chest and my hips. It never did.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

31. “In my experience,′ he said, ’it is a noble person who loves the stars.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

32. “But you failed to realize that America has only ever deemed certain heritages worth preserving. If the Lenape were forced from their ancestral home on the island of Mannahatta, the eviction of Little Syria’s impoverished immigrants is no surprise, and it’s hard for me to imagine that things will ever be any different.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

33. “You taught me that revelation has its price in a world that prefers the comfort of closed eyes.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

34. “Borders are nothing to words and blood.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

35. “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.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

36. “Facing myself in the mirror is like that. If I never cut my hair, if I don’t acknowledge that I’ve never allowed anyone to really know me, I can pretend that a perfect road awaits me. I can pretend there’s some medicine that will magically allow me to see myself. But going down that road might mean discovering that there is no magic strong enough to bring me into harmony. Breaking the illusion means acknowledging the parts of myself that will never be visible.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

37. “I decided to go, too, and I know it’s the right decision because as soon as I said it, I felt a little braver, a little more like Khalti.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

38. “Mr. Harris kept glancing up and down Omar’s body, lingering around his chest and his groin. At first, Omar pretended not to notice. It was a compulsive kind of looking, one that cis people indulged in when they believed they could do it without being seen, though it was so common to catch them looking that their lack of shame was obvious.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

39. “Sami’s chest rises and falls, and I realize that, with nothing in the way, he can hug his loved ones closer to his heart.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar

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

— Zeyn Joukhadar

41. “As I spoke, something shifted in me. The feeling rose that this woman, if she were to deem the pigeon unworthy, would also be judging me, and Khalto Tala, and the widow Haddad. It was an absurd thing, there there it was. A second sense came on its heels, something I had never felt before and which frightened me: the sense that I could not convince this American woman, whose judgements dictated my livelihood, of the value of things and people I cared a great deal about.”

— Zeyn Joukhadar