Best Quotes from The Language Of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber with Page Numbers

We are Arab at home and American in the streets.

Eat it now, it’s good right this second.

The streets are where Bud speaks English in a loud voice, swaggers, wears hard-soled shoes.

I learn early: We are Arab at home and American in the streets.

They’ll be hungry because everyone who 'comesover' is hungry: for home, for family, for the old smells and touches and tastes.

I realize I’m not quite done with him yet.

What is it with these sensitive, crazy men?

In our family, we assume that everyone is simply dying to come here.

It is the first time I’ve seen him smile.

Sometimes . . . some men—they get a little funny.

He is tired, but he’s full of the immigrant’s hopefulness and determination, ready to take any job.

Bud misses the old country so much, it’s like an ache in his blood.

I was born into this snowy Syracuse world. I have no inkling of what other worlds are like.

Melt the butter in a frying pan and sauté the garlic and onions until they are golden.

But in the plus category, I have a friend named Francis, a soft-voiced boy with telescopic glasses, whom I boss around the school yard.

I realize that I’m what my uncle Hal calls a 'fancy idiot.'

The cafeteria is also my first exposure to truly awful food: Its rotting, industrial stink permeates the room.

It turns out we are now best friends.

Yes, they’re right, I think.

She craves food from the Holy Land!

"My mother’s quiet presence is subtle yet familiar to me as a texture of air, like the fullness that lifts a room when the windows open after a long winter."

"She does not struggle and grapple with the world; unlike Bud, she is at ease."

"It seems we spend whole afternoons in this way, talking and swimming through our private thoughts."

"They sit together on low cushions in the courtyard and tease me about my pale skin, kiss my head and cheeks, and read my coffee grounds."

"But I discover that it’s challenging and absorbing to gnaw on the hard little unmarinated yogurt rocks."

"It’s hard to make out her expression under the cherry lights. She appears to be thinking about it, staring out to where Bud is still drifting around, piping and tootling like a tugboat."

"I touch the liquid sand as well. It turns from beige to amber. It is that simple. Just lovely."

"The men all take turns carefully feeding the little foreign girls; our skin pale and shiny as soap, our eyes round as coins."

"I could tell right away that he is the one I like best of all: He is about my age, small and thin and dark with close-cropped hair, soft, myopic eyes, and full, round, almost feminine lips."

"And part of me is glad he won’t tell. I have the feeling that perhaps even he isn’t sure of what the question is yet."

A House and a YardAmerica is a cold breeze that snaps us awake.

When I wake in a hotel bed on the first morning back in America, I’m dazed by a blankness around me.

There is something mothlike about the houses in this new neighborhood—in the morning they look half-dissolved.

But once she tries it, spooning it right out of the pan, she nods with her spoon in the air and says, 'Okay, yeah, I see your point.'

Sally has a pert turned-up nose and pink freckles and ringlets of ribbon red hair.

When I first behold this tree, my heart speeds up and little jittery bursts pulse under my skin.

I don’t like it, I think, because I’ve somehow forgotten it. I must remember.

I keep gliding through the expanding dark.

How can I stop now?

We are lost in the food, in the smell of grilling, and in the spring when there is a powdery sort of sensation sprinkling down the back of my neck.

"Listen to me—I know."

"Men are trouble."

"She indulges her grandchildren like a maniac."

"It’s high time."

"She wears the big raccoon coat, and we two very classy ladies wait on the curb in front of her building for the bus."

"The bus is the world!"

"Always as a boy, I loved the opera."

"Only the sorts of people who’ve really known suffering really appreciate the opera."

"From suffering come the greatest art."

"You will travel far and meet mysterious strangers."

"But why would anyone make such a choice?"

"When I hear this announcement, I run around the house three times without stopping, electrified with excitement."

"Let the snow take you into its breathing body, feel the subtle, fish-soft slips and slides of the car in motion."

"It feels like the true center of gravity of the universe."

"This chicken leg contains the wonders of the world and the seven heavens. Someday I will write a poem about this chicken leg."

"The world seems exciting and strange tonight, the well-deep blackness in the window full of tracery."

"The lingering scent and smoke of the grill fixes the moment inside of me."

"She says that dinner is a moral imperative and dessert is its own reward."

"The night expands and the kitchen ceiling lifts and the taste of the knaffea lingers in memory like a musical phrase."

"Beyond the windows above the bed, the American night glows with the cold, with the shininess of time and its passage."

"Sometimes he’ll turn angry and frustrated if anyone questions his big Jordan plans; it’s easy to bruise his dignity."

"But something is different this time."

"I’ve lost my sense of Jordan. If we move back there, I don’t know what I’ll be any longer."

"My shoulders slump, heavy and sullen with all the things I’m not allowed to say."

"I can’t stand the taste of food, everything catches in my throat, my skin is too sensitive, and my clothes scratch."

"A better girl would have embraced the Saturday morning Arabic lessons in the old church basement downtown."

"What’s more, the apartment complex has a grand blue slab of pool that we spend the pallid upstate summer in."

"How will I ever take care of all these people?"

"The countryside feels vast and fabulous, depressing, inspiring, and inescapable: utterly isolated."

"Their faces are raw with dirt, and their bikes make screeching noises with every pedal push."

"I’ve had it with this place, I’m done—I quit!"

"It feels a bit like a holiday as well."

"You’re not the boss of me."

"I can’t keep going, but I won’t give in, either."

"I know, but I just can’t help it."

"I’ll find you—that’s it."

"We’ll never leave this place again."

"I’m tired of being dragged from house to house and being told who to be, what to feel, how to behave."

"We are alone, without names, just our skin and loud breath."

"There is nowhere else to go."

"Ya Ba, history is a funny thing. It’s a funny, funny thing. And so is love."

"I rather to think that she did. I rather to believe in a happy kind of an ending."

"But at least they got married. The end."

"What sort of idiot believes that pots can give birth!"

"It was important work. We kept the king’s rice clean!"

"Maybe I liked it. I don’t know."

"Because you might accidentally kill myself. He used to knock on my head—" Bud makes a rapping gesture at his temple. 'He’d say, ‘What’s in there? Rocks!’"

"I wanted to be the one who made the mjeddrah."

"Clean the lentils carefully, and everyone will love you."

"I think he must be king of Australia by now."

We take as many classes as possible together, and I can still recall the teachers’ despair.

Our lunch bags open and the scent of garlic, fried onions, and tomato sauce rolls out.

I become famous for my lunch bags full of garlic-roasted lamb and stuffed grape leaves.

Most of us have parents from countries where a certain lushness is considered alluring in a woman.

He escaped the camps and crossed Europe on foot, enduring dramatic perils.

Maybe he’s haunted.

His smile is benign and uncomplicated.

Each of my friends has parents who grew up speaking different languages from our own.

The skin of your father’s cooked cabbage is like a flower.

I have lost myself in studying the ghostly patterns and nurturing a mild sadness under my ribs.

"I will be in back, creating! You and your sisters will be out front, taking the orders and making the customers happy and laughing."

"It’s going to be running together like this—" He interlaces his fingers. "A perfect running-together machine!"

"In this world, there is always more room," Waleed says. "Thanks be to God."

"You see America the beautiful. It’s right here. And it’s telling you: Come here, open a restaurant, be who you are."

"I used to be crazy—back in the days when I wanted to go back to Jordan. I was like a baby who only wants to be with his mother. But now!"

"Only here in America can such a thing as this happen."

"This golden place, no mere restaurant, will be a Shangri-la that finally heals the old wound between East and West."

"It will be full of secrets like this."

"Do you know what it’s saying to us?" No, what, Dad? "It’s saying, ‘I am more delicious than anything. People will come from everywhere to taste me. I am the queen of all!’"

"You have to boil it good first and then you fry it! And sometimes you reverse it. How many people you think know about that?"

“But how do you feel about baklava?”

“For when you need to calm down and figure things out.”

“The first intimation I have heard of another way through life.”

“What do you want—a baby or a cake? The answer will come to you like bells ringing.”

“Never let anyone tell you what to say or feel or think. No exceptions.”

“We clean the butter to remind ourselves of the way our lives should be—light, delicate, and pure.”

“Food is not sweetness and families and little flying hearts.”

“Eating is a form of listening.”

“How about peace in the Middle East?”

“The woman who made the baklava has something to say to you!”

A boy liked me! My father chased him away!

I can’t believe any of this has happened. I am not prepared to accept that life can be so unfair.

I’ve heard Bud’s speech many times before, but listening to it in the clear, public presence of a stranger makes it excruciating.

I don’t know a thing about Ray Jansen, but suddenly he seems like the only thing in my life that has ever really mattered at all.

There are all sorts of things that can be done that don’t require anyone’s permission.

My mouth is open, my indignation shimmers.

I can’t hold on to my anger as I tire. It seeps out of me in wisps.

He can’t even see me.

I know then that there are all sorts of things that can be done that don’t require anyone’s permission.

I marvel at how natural it feels to link hands with this boy, a stranger.

"What seemed parental and dully natural to me now becomes charged with possibility."

"I’ve grown up within the curve of dinner parties; the years of inviting and cooking vibrate behind the pages as I read."

"I want to be in love, to be set loose in a mystery."

"Over and over again, I just let go."

"What choice do I have? Everything presses down on me—the walls are too close, our house is too crowded."

"I notice Mahaleani eyeing the back door, Olga and Sonja twisting their hair, nipping at their nails."

"Then Jay Franklin delicately steers his hair behind one ear with a finger and says, 'Diana told us you make your own hummus.'"

"I realize, with some regret, that I can never have anything to do with Jay Franklin again."

"You just have to ask the right question in the right way."

"Finally he nods, first to himself, then to the world, and says, 'Okay, why not?'"

High school is sucking the air out of me.

I’ve become convinced that college is where my life will begin.

I settle into one of the tall chairs on rolling casters behind the counter.

If we like someone, we dribble in extra.

The metal grating rumbles up with a crash, and the first wave of Sweet Shoppe aroma makes my stomach trip.

I discover that my co-workers consider nibbling from the jars a way to supplement their food budget.

I try to convince a number of my dormmates to attend Jewish Foods Week with me.

The taste is clear and direct as emotion, glowing inside me, keenly edged with longing.

The night belongs to me alone. It is a creature of my own invention—a new, seductive country.

The nausea has stopped as mysteriously as it started.

I learned that no one can stop me or make me tell the story any differently from the precise, exact, ruthless way I want to tell it.

I remember the pure, physical pleasure of seeing my voice caught and pressed into print for the first time.

I know that she is telling me—as she has in her subtle ways over the years—that I shall be a writer.

Each event is one piece in the path of claiming myself.

As I begin to teach and publish, I begin to own a little more of my own story.

The necklace is like a dash of light, by far the nicest thing in the whole apartment.

I feel anointed, recognized in the deepest possible way.

This is not the way he would tell the story! And maybe there is a little sadness there as well—the sadness that comes from watching something new grow out of your hands.

I did enjoy eating lunch with the boy.

But I can’t be married with much success, it seems, because during my twenties so much of me still belongs to my parents.

"I have published a novel, but my life doesn’t exactly crack open, the angels don’t pour down."

"My sense of connection to Jordan has been winnowed down by time, my memory of the place gone soft and silvery as a piece of driftwood."

"Sometimes it’s too intimidating to look at things directly, to think, Now for the first time I will go to live in Jordan, I will choose it freely, and I will see if this place has anything at all to do with me."

"I try to breathe deeply."

"There’s pitch-blackness as we roar down the runway, and when we lift off, I feel invisible, lighter than the unlit air, rising into the night, a transparent blackness."

"My mother is the voice of sanity in our family—for which I love her beyond all reckoning."

"My family is full of snappy dressers, big dreamers, holy fools, drug addicts, riot starters, layabouts, poets, con men, gurus, murderers, gamblers, diplomats, tyrants, professors, vicious gossips, magicians, toughs, snobs, petty thieves, big crooks, rich guys, mesmerists, gigolos, and fancy idiots."

"Hospitality to the Jordanians is more than a virtue; it’s a sacrament and exaltation."

"I come back to my rented apartment after each of these events angry with myself for losing another day and vowing to get more work done tomorrow."

"It is a risk to compliment anyone here on anything—their shirt, for example—as they’re apt to push it on you in the middle of a dinner party."

His wealth is like a golden drapery tossed over everything.

There is something wrong in that house.

What is it? I press the receiver against my head so hard that my ear hurts.

We know you Americans like your treats!

A single tomato cut into quarters, a sliced cucumber, a minute plate of coarse salt.

Where Jimmy is puffed up, Roni is hollowed out; where Jimmy is glacial and cold-blooded, Roni is parched and birdlike.

Something from an Edgar Allan Poe story or from the next world altogether.

The screams get louder, they raise their voices.

The most gratifying part of the meal.

I hope forever, this house of crying.

"There is a feeling of expectation, the urgency of rain-slicked city nights as traffic picks up and someone is going somewhere all the time."

"Sometimes there's no escaping Western capitalism; it just flits ephemerally from topic to topic."

"It would seem that Bud is finally in place. His history spirals directly from this wind and desert, where distances dip into pools of shadow."

"Perhaps I inherited this trait from Bud. My mother knows that we are inescapably responsible for our lives and are the masters of our own futures."

"With Mom, what you see is what you get, plain and simple."

"He’s not eating—this Phin-Phan—What do you mean he doesn’t like the food?"

"But Bud is in an undentable good mood. He is the happiest I’ve seen him in years."

"The moon comes up, emanating a halo of light, and all the grandchildren fall asleep draped over their mothers’ laps."

"How can I give up such surety? It’s the only thing I know anymore; it is the house I’ve lived in for so long."

"I am a reluctant Bedouin—I miss and I long for every place, every country, I have ever lived—and frequently even the places my friends and my family have lived and talked about."