The Map of Salt and Stars

I am a woman and a warrior. If you think I can't be both, you've been lied to.

Don't forget,' he says, and Abu Sayeed looks up while he translates, holding the words back a little, 'stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It's living that hurts us.

The most important places on a map are the places we haven't been yet

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

Stories are powerful, but gather too many of the words of others in your heart and they will drown out your own. Remember that

God smiles through the cracks in broken things.

But safety is not about never having bad things happen to you. It's about knowing that the bad things can't separate us from each other.

Like most people, the name history gave them isn't what they call themselves.

I am the dust of stars inhaled.

People think that stories can be walled off, kept outside and separate. They can’t. Stories are inside you

You are the stories you tell yourself.

Stones don't have to be whole to be lovely," he says. "Even cracked ones can be polished and set. Small diamonds, if they are clear and well cut, can be more valuable than big ones with impurities. Listen," he says. Sometimes the brightest stars shine brightest, no?

I know God heard them both the same at the end, that he loved them both equally even though their prayers were different.

New York?" Itto looks down at me. "You may be American, but you are still Syrian." I rub the camel's coarse hair with my palms. "How?" "A person ca 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.

the story often matters less than the telling

Wealth is no substitute for belonging

My whole life, Mama and Baba celebrated two religions' worth of holidays—Christmas, Eid al-Fitr, Easter. It used to make me wonder whether the most important things we see in God are really in each other.

My name is a song I sing myself to remind me of my mothers voice. My name does not bend to your tongue, does not stop at your borders. My name is not a flight risk. I sing my name to remind me of a time where our language was in our blood. A time when our mothers were in our hair, a time when vowels came from the same deep place as laughter, and the pit of thirst was not so wide. Oh beloved, I walk the gauntlet of life barefoot and bound, clawing at the hills for the voice I left at the house where my mother and her own were born. I gather words like stones to feed my children, they thirst for words that sound like the shape of their eyes. Where oh beloved, where will I find such words?

Every place you go becomes a part of you.

He said, ‘People don’t get lost on the outside. They get lost on the inside. Why are there no maps of that?’

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.

There is a goodness in the world that got me through, that taught me it's important to know who you are.

She had thought the open sea would be flat, like a mirror or a coin. But it had colors and shapes, turning green or black under approaching storm. Sometimes it was red and purple and silver and white gold. It had sharp hedges. It had its tempers, its blue spells, its fits of laughter

I ask, 'Do you think there's a place in the world where nobody has ever put their feet?' 'I think there are more of them than the other way around,' Mama says.

But as long as you're alive,' she says, 'you have a voice. You're the one who has to hear it.

Last night was too dark for stars,' I say. 'No, little cloud.' Abu Sayeed lifts my chin with his finger. 'If anything, the darker the night, the brighter they shine.

In the pockets of my heart without any words, I want to believe.

Nobody can love the stars and hurt people. They just can't.

He told Rawiya to be careful of words. "Stories are powerful," he said, "but gather too many words of others in your heart, and they will drown out your own.

Sometimes the smallest stars shine brightest, no?