What Adam was witnessing were the remnants of a culture where once he was, by law, obeyed and pacified. That kind of “hospitality” was in fact a legacy of his people’s wrongdoing. Or maybe it went further back still; maybe it was this “hospitality” that gave colonizers the impression that they were welcome in the first place, to claim a land and pe

“Only cowards run away. I’m strong enough for this.”

And so I hope my feelings for Shiba, even though they contained a kind of adoration, did not resemble the love with which men smother and contain women, pinning them down like butterflies on a board, with their names underneath in elegant calligraphy.

you could recognize it, I reasoned, if something in you vibrated in attunement to good work, then surely you also contained the capacity to create that kind of work.

felt that Naima was making a jibe at my own life there, and it was unfair. Naima often made decisions this way, diving in headfirst, but she wasn’t recognizing that her impulsiveness was a privilege. She was only able to live like this because she’d always had someone to catch her on the other side. She’d grown up with a loving mother and a doting

Naima hadn’t “manifested” Azeem, she’d manufactured him. She’d created an image in her head and found someone to project it on, someone who, a bit of a blank, a bit of a people pleaser, happily accommodated her fantasies.

It’s not that translation is a subjective process, exactly. In fact, in a way, it’s highly mathematical. It’s about retaining the feeling, the thing underneath. It’s as if you go underground, and there are all these shapes and colors, and there you see that, oh, died in this language is closest in color and shape, consistency and texture, to passed

It made me paradoxically wish I could spend my whole life being single while also knowing that the singlehood was temporary.

It’s always been like that, I thought, so much gratitude and admiration when a white person speaks a non-white language and only contempt and indignation for non-white people who don’t speak English. The double standards of language learning.