Raja’a Alem, The Dove’s Necklace (طوق الحمام) Tran. Katharine Halls And Adam Talib (Preface)

« I’m thirty-four and I meet a man with very blue eyes who looks inside me. He tells me he can see me at sixteen, at eight, as a child when he makes love to me. His eyes open and close very slowly next to my face. Sometimes they half close and look down and they are grey-green, cool, and then they slide up and pierce me with open sky. Sometimes he lies close and breathes into my mouth and the breath is sweet, whatever we’ve done. I clutch momentarily at the edges of this deep drop into his love, then free-fall, my chest open to the heart, and drift in on his sweet air. »

To William with love. Sept 21st 1967 - March 13th 2018

Victoria Harwood Butler-Sloss, The Seamstress of Ourfa (Dedication)

« Growing up, I read a lot. Partly because I loved it, and partly because there wasn’t much else to do as a teenage girl in Aligarh. Given the tacit boundaries of my conservatively liberal Muslim family, the world outside my door was as distant as a faraway continent. I ventured into it like a tourist. To school, family outings to the cinema, a few social events with friends. All of these expeditions were monitored and supervised. Crucially, they all required reasons – a sanctioned purpose that permitted my presence on the streets, which could never be aimless. My male cousins roamed the thoroughfares of Aligarh freely, spending late nights at buzzy tea shops, leaping over walls, gazing at the stars. I cultivated a fluency in occupying interiors. Reading, then, was a path into possibilities; it offered a parallel terrain which I could stride through boldly. »

« Books were thus my private continent, providing both excitement and safety. They were my maps to navigating the world, and also the way I created a sense of belonging, of being at home. They opened up worlds for me, without my leaving the house. »

Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, Taran N. Khan

— Sarah Bakewell, from “Sarah Bakewell on Posthumanism, Transhumanism, and What it Actually Means to be ‘Human’” (via LitHub)

« The town looked golden and antique and the mountains next to us were covered with thin pine trees. Beirut, from this bench, was like a dream, a winding staircase of awkward memories and people who no longer were, who one day would no longer be. »

Nur Turkmani, Black Hole (Source: Rusted Radishes)

« For a moment it felt like we weren’t in the Danube but in the river of time, and everyone was at a different point, though in a sense we were all here at once. »

Elif Batuman, The Idiot

« Julian walks into the Duomo and a rush of cool air washes over him. There is a small group of students standing before the altar, and a few people are sitting in the pews. He finds a seat near the apse and rests his eyes briefly, before resuming his tour of the cathedral while listening to the Mahler symphony again on his headphones. Parts of the first movement have always struck him as discordant. Yet somehow the mess of interlocking notes works. It seems to him that the Gothic vaults and imposing columns of the cathedral share this quality of dissonance. He remembers vaguely something that Aidan once told him, that architecture could be likened to music; that music is, in turn, liquid architecture. And if music is a temporal art—the division and expansion of notes in time—that meant architecture, as petrified music, is frozen time. »

Christine Lai, Landscapes

« Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

And dance me to the end of love »

Leonard Cohen, Dance Me to the End of Love

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“إلى من لم ت/ييأس: الحبّ مقاومة”

“To he/she whom did not despair: love is resistance”

October 17 (thawra) graffiti from the streets of Beirut

« There is no such thing as identity with a single name, there is only identification with multiple names. Identifications cannot and must not be considered via proper names because they lead to improper circumstances: it is those imaginings that prioritise ethnic identification over being an islander, or that prioritise identity to make it the higher, proper or uppercase, that have been the central culprits for the legacy of bloody binary contests and conflict in cases of partition. »

Alev Adil, Nicosia Beyond Barriers: Voices from a Divided City