Sonora Quotes

“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, Sonora

“We would survive even ourselves, as long as we were together.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“I looked at Laura . . . and wondered at how many lives before this life we might have known together.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“This is it. This is how I always saw heaven, always by the sea, always by night, always in the dark.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“What if we love the black hole in the center of all things? What if we are people like that? People who love to be cursed?”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“No one had told me that you can wake up, years passed, and not understand the person you are, the things you did the night before, the things you said, the things left undone, that it can feel like a nightmare, a wildly seductive, spinning nightmare.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“I thought he had come to save my life.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“It was so pure, the snow, the purest of all powders, I thought, so pure it must be from elsewhere, from another planet.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“One day you look in the mirror and you see your parents' sadness in your eyes.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“New York was always so beautiful in the very crux of parting with it.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“With this man I will never want. With this man I will never be sad again.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“Find someone who loves you more than you love them.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“The bad angels were the jinn, and the good angels were the jinn too, and we spoke to them both in the desert. In Arabic, jinn has the same root as the word for paradise, jenna. The word for jinn and the word for paradise both have the same root as the word for madness, junun. To be close to the jinn is to be close to madness, is to be even closer to paradise.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“I lit a cigarette. 'Go ahead, take a smoke,' my father said. 'It won't kill you. Only sadness will.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“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, Sonora

“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, Sonora