Diana Abu-Jaber > Quotes

“Marry, don't marry,' Auntie Aya says as we unfold layers of dough to make an apple strudel.

Just don't have your babies unless it's absolutely necessary.'

How do I know if it's necessary?'

She stops and stares ahead, her hands gloved in flour. 'Ask yourself, Do I want a baby or do I want to make a cake? The answer will come to you like bells ringing.' She flickers her fingers in the air by her ear. 'For me, almost always, the answer was cake.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, The Language of Baklava: A Memoir

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“...tasting a piece of bread that someone bought is like looking at that person, but tasting a piece of bread that they baked is like looking out of their eyes.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“People look at you and forget about things.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“Here is something you have to understand about stories: They point you in the right direction but they can't take you all the way there. Stories are crescent moons; they glimmer in the night sky, but they are most exquisite in their incomplete state. Because people crave the beauty of not-knowing, the excitement of suggestion, and the sweet tragedy of mystery.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“She stares at her knife and wishes she were smarter about things. Wishes she knew how to say something wise or consoling to him, something that wouldn't sound frightened or awkward. But then she remembers the time after her parents' death, when people would approach her and try to explain her loss to her; they said things that were supposed to cure her of her sadness, but that had no effect at all. And she knew then, even when she was nine years old, that there was no wise or consoling thing to say. There were certain helpful kinds of silences, and some were better than others. ”
― Diane Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“When Matussem Ramoud opened his eyes each morning, his wife would still not be there. ”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Arabian Jazz

“The loneliness of the arab is a terrible thing; it is all consuming. It is already present like a little shadow under the heart when he lays his head on his mother's lap; it threatens to swallow him whole when he leaves his own country, even though he marries and travels and talks to friends twenty-four hours a day. That is the way Sirine suspects that Arabs feel everything - larger than life, feelings walking in the sky.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“Tomorrow is the start of Ramadan, a month of daily fasting, broken by an iftar, a special meal after sunset and a bite before sunrise. Han has told her that the idea behind the fast of Ramadan is to remind everyone of the poor and less fortunate, a time of charity, compassion, abstinence, and forgiveness. And even though Um-Nadia claims to have no religion and many of their customers are Christians, they all like to eat the traditional foods prepared throughout the Middle East to celebrate the nightly fast-breaking during Ramadan. There are dishes like sweet qatayif crepes and cookies and creamy drinks and thick apricot nectar.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“His expression seems a sort of surrender: the loss of a thing that he has already lost before.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“I’m in my junior year but I can’t take it anymore. The beige walls, the scent of linoleum and used lockers, the shrill bell between classes. High school is sucking the life out of me.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, The Language of Baklava: A Memoir

“Dad says that everyone invented baklava.” It occurs to me now to wonder what that means. Aunt Aya rolls her eyes.
“Your father? He is the worst of the worst. He thinks he cooks and eats Arabic food but these walnuts were not grown from Jordanian earth and this butter was not made from Jordanian lambs. He is eating the shadow of a memory. He cooks to remember but the more he eats, the more he forgets.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, The Language of Baklava: A Memoir

“Love and prayer are intimately related.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“..cold, like swallowed tears.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“The streets of Aqaba are shell spirals and, on summer nights, crowded and complicated as a woman's heart.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“She let herself stray past the stage of sleep and even past the stage of remembering, and she wanders into the stage of soul-searching. Sometimes when she lies awake her body feels as finely made as a tuning fork. She can hear and smell the most delicate things, the smell and music of thought itself.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“She wonders sometimes if it's a sort of flaw or lack in her - the inability to lose herself in someone else. . . . she's never quite understood how people could trade in quiet spaces and solitary gardens and courtyards, thoughtful walks and the delicious rhythms of work, for the fearful tumult of falling in love.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“There's a time when things go out of tune. It's not all the time. It's not even a lot of the time. But it is some of the time. And then you have to deal with it all. Everything comes out wrong. You dream about goats and monkeys. People start to look at things wrong. Maybe you think the world looks squashed and flat. Maybe you get stones in the bulgar and you burn the smoked wheat.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“This morning's pastry poses challenges. To assemble the tiny mosaic disks of chocolate flake and candied ginger, Avis must execute a number of discrete, ritualistic steps: scraping the chocolate with a fine grater, rolling the dough cylinder in large-grain sanding sugar, and assembling the ingredients atop each hand-cut disk of dough in a pointillist collage. Her husband wavers near the counter, watching. "They're like something Marie Antoinette would wear around her neck. When she still had one."
"I thought she was more interested in cake," Avis says, she tilts her narrow shoulders, veers around him to stack dishes in the sink.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Birds of Paradise

“The sky is white.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“Aunt Rachel removes the knaffea from the oven and places it on its sumptuous tray; the shredded phyllo dough is crisp and brown, crackling with hot, rose-scented syrup. Nestled within, like a naughty secret, is the melting layer of sweet cheese. The pastry is freshly hot, the only way to eat it, really, with its miraculous study in contrasts— the running cheese hidden within crisp, crackling layers of baked phyllo and the distinctive, brocaded complexities of flavors. It’s so hot that it steams in your mouth, and at first you eat it with just the tips of your teeth. Then the layers of crisp and sweet and soft intermingle, a series of surprises. It is so rich and dense that you can eat only a little bit, and then it is over and the knaffea is just a pleasant memory—like a lovely dream that you forget a few seconds after you wake. But for a few seconds, you knew you were eating knaffea.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, The Language of Baklava

“You want to protect you children, don't you? You let them out of your body but you never let them all the way out.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“He tells about his Sudanese roommate at Georgetown who owned a prayer rug with a compass to find Mecca built right into it. "After a few weeks in America, he rolled it up and used the compass to go camping," Han says.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“This is also a story about what a good thing it is to forgive— a relief to the one who did the bad thing, and a great relief to the one who gets to forgive!”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“The flavors are intense in her mouth, the sweet-almondy fruitiness of the pistachios beside the smoky sour taste of the sumac, delicate saffron, and herbal notes of olive.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“It's been over a year since they've visited their son's market. As they walk through the parking lot they take in a number of improvements. Brian admires the raised garden beds made of cedar planks that flank the sides of the lot. There are stalks of tomatoes, staked beans, baskets of green herbs- oregano, lavender, fragrant blades of lemongrass and pointed curry leaf. The planter of baby lettuces has a chalkboard hung from its side: "Just add fork." A wheelbarrow parked by the door is heaped with bright coronas of sunflowers, white daisies, jagged red ginger and birds-of-paradise. Avis feels a leap of pride as they enter the market: the floor of polished bamboo, the sky-blue ceiling, the wooden shelves- like bookshelves in a library. And the smells. Warm, round billows of baking bread, roasting garlic and onions and chicken.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Birds of Paradise

“He believes that this man has looped a bit of the thread-leash through a corner of his soul.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent

“A cookie, Avis told her children, is a soul. She held up the wafer, its edges shimmering with ruby-dark sugar. "You think it looks like a tiny thing, right? Just a little nothing. But then you take a bite."
Four-year-old Felice lifted her face. Avis fanned her daughter's eyes closed with her fingertips and placed it in Felice's mouth. Felice opened her sheer eyes. Lamb slid his orange length against her ankles. Avis handed a cookie to eight-year-old Stanley, who held it up to his nose. "Does that taste good?" she asked. Felice nodded and opened her mouth again.
"It smells like flowers," Stanley said.
"Yes." Avis paused, a cookie balanced on her spatula. "That's the rosewater. Good palate, darling."
"Mermaids eat roses," Felice said. "Then they melt.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Birds of Paradise

“Sometimes when she lies awake her body feels as finely made as a tuning fork. She can hear and smell the most delicate things, the smell and music of thought itself.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent