Sonora Quotes

My father, a Palestinian, and my mother, an Israeli, met in a bar in New York. Their encounter was a blue shift. An anomaly. A collision. In the end, I understand, it is only for this we live. All I ever wanted was to love.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Through my sudden tears, the train lights smeared like shooting stars. Lying before the rippling blue window, below the slurred lights of the world above, it was as if we were underwater.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I asked the boy who wept what it felt like, crystal meth, the prettiest name for a drug besides heroin. Crystal methamphetamine. His head fell back. He closed his eyes, then opened them. 'Come on, you know . . . you're just high as fuck.' Then in a dramatic whisper: 'Everything goes silent like a midnight of the mind.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Like hunting for a dead beloved's face among the living, in places, we find the place we loved before.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

We would survive even ourselves, as long as we were together.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

You and I, your mother, Ahlam, we are from up there,' my father continued. 'We come from the stunning stars. We were just born in the wrong place. We were meant to live on another planet. The people who come to the desert are those who know this, deep inside of them, we are from up there. From far, far away.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I don't think I'm from this galaxy at all. I believe I came from the Andromeda galaxy, not so far, but far enough. Maybe that's why I'm an outcast.' He drew the spiral of Andromeda close to the Milky Way, almost touching. Then he pointed to Andromeda in the night sky above us.'Maybe that's where I'm from too,' my father said. We could still see the stars.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

There is no moon. The stars have risen and fallen and given way to a new spread, to the smeared heart of our Milky Way.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

This is it. This is how I always saw heaven, always by the sea, always by night, always in the dark.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

For those I come from, there is nothing more devouring than the feeling of want for home, the feeling of need for home. We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer to carry us out of the too-dark night.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Look at the lonely fisherman,' my father says.'Look at his view,' my mother says.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

My father insisted I eat red meat. 'You'll lose your brain without food,' he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

New York was always so beautiful in the very crux of parting with it.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Her father kneels and unclasps the urn. Above the waves she falls graceful as snow, my sister, my Sonora.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

When you are rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it . . . Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

We both knew no bounds to our escapism.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I lit a cigarette. 'Go ahead, take a smoke,' my father said. 'It won't kill you. Only sadness will.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

One day you look in the mirror and you see your parents' sadness in your eyes.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I have forgiven Sonora. I have forgiven New York, forsaken the recursion of history. But I do not yet know how to forgive myself.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I look out at the reservation, still and glittering with casinos, and think of all the death dried up and buried in its dirt.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I faded out. I was for a moment my father tapping on his cigarette, the way he holds it, crushing it flat. I was my mother at the sink, staring into the desert from the kitchen window, dishes in hand. I was in all the beds I'd ever slept in. Me sinking into the sheets, letting my thoughts fall down. I was running alongside the ocean, Laura splashing me with water. I was dancing to a melody I did not recognize, spinning wild and lovely into exalted leaps. I was no one again. I was someone with no name, no past. My face resumed the freshness of birth, the brightness was again in my eyes, the brightness only children own before life begins its wreckage.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I first understood why Christians prayed for a savior in the form of a beautiful man. He had absolved me of the blue-streaked blond.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

It was all so foolish then, as it is now, as it is forever. To be in love with beauty. To try to hold on to it.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

When I returned to New York, it had already changed. I always wished things could just remain.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

With the years, we become even more ourselves and call this change.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Nightmares always recur, but never our most beautiful dreams.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I slowly lost any dream for myself. No one warned me of this, that the stars in New York can infect the light inside, that they can trap you in their shadow. Dylan was of course a star. He had achieved the thing we all came to New York wanting.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

We are all cursed. We live in the era of the curse. A world that cannot be fixed. The best thing would be an alien ship. Another planet. One with three moons. But you, I saw you in my dreams. I saw you coming. You came to heal my broken heart. That's why I named you Ahlam.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I meditated on my childhood, vague and distant before high school, where Laura still flickered only on the edge of things.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Our past would dissolve. We would move on from each other and from the ghosts of our youth.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

We remained talking, fighting gently or viciously for what seemed like hours, but it was only minutes or perhaps a second, because it was only a dream.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

We remained talking, fighting gently or viciously for what seemed like hours, but it was only minutes or perhaps a second, because it was only a dream.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Don't fall in love or let anyone's life become more important than your own.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I am a memory house for those I have lost, those I no longer know.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

My brain came alight with tenderness for her. I felt so sorry for everything. I yearned to embrace her, kiss her even, to stay with her, always her, my sister, my friend to the end. It was a story after all, even if a sick one. It was completely ours.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I wanted to walk faster, to run, far as possible from her, from my entire life, from the first day I ever saw her always just a few steps ahead.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

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