Quotes from Camilla Gibb

It is his absence that is part of me and has been for years. This is who I am, perhaps who we all are, keepers of the absent and the dead. It is the blessing and burden of being alive.

That idea is strange to me. People keep on loving? People keep on loving even if you are not there in their face everyday to remind them? People keep on loving even if they no longer see you at all? People keep on loving even if they are loving someone else? Impossible: to believe you can be loved in absence when you don't even know how it feels to be loved when you are there.

It is his absence that is part of me and has been for years. This is who I am, perhaps who we all are, keepers of the absent and the dead. It is the blessing and burden of being alive.

She kisses the children goodnight, leaving lipstick on their foreheads and a trail of Chanel No.5.

Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.

Writing made it tolerable to be human in a way nothing else ever had. It gave me a place to thrive, to exorcise, to cultivate some understanding of aspects of being human that were otherwise confounding.

How is it that disappointment arrives as soon as what you have desired for so long steps over the threshold? It's like finding the end of your wedding train dragging behind in the mud.

The reality of this wide-eyed caramel-coloured wonder was arresting. This was the future, alive and kicking in my arms.

It is harder in many ways to live in the middle than at the edges. Much harder to interpret as you see fit, because then you have no assurance you are doing right in the eyes of God, no confidence you will be rewarded in the afterlife

He wrote the future onto my face with his lips.

In tourism college they were taught that American notions of what constitutes a personal question are quite different from their own. TÆ° has learned this the hard way, through responses to questions like: And what do they pay you to be a pharmaceutical representative with GlaxoSmithKline, Mr. Clark? Is this lady your wife or your daughter? Do they have the death penalty in your state of Texas? Why are the insides of your ears so hairy?

The history of Vietnam lies in this bowl, for it is in Hanoi, the Vietnamese heart, that ph? was born, a combination of the rice noodles that predominated after a thousand years of Chinese occupation and the taste for beef the Vietnamese acquired under the French, who turned their cows away from ploughs and into bifteck and pot-au-feu. The name of their national soup is pronounced like this French word for fire...

The velvet darkness of his face

I never expected to be happy, to have a sense of belonging somewhere. I didn't grow up with a sense that this was possible or even desirable. I'm quite sure my parents didn't either, so I come by this honestly.

In order to know someone who is at some level unknowable, you must leave yourself wide open. If you don't, you foreclose the possibility of learning something critical about this person you need, your parent, the person upon whom your survival depends. It's like time-lapse photography; your lens at maximum aperture in order to capture something fleeting and elusive. The problem becomes one of calibration. How to protect yourself in the process. How to capture something without going blind.

If someone eliminates the obstacles you believe to be in front of you, then you have no choice but to try. Fail spectacularly, if you will, but try.

I was not always a Muslim, but once I was led into the absorption of prayer and the mysteries of the Qur'an, something troubled in me became still.

She asked me if Christmas was a particularly tense time and whether my father had ever hit my mother while trimming the tree. I couldn't remember anything like that happening, and although it seemed possible, I was suspicious when she asked me if my father had ever thrust the silver star at my mother to deliberately pierce her hand. I said no and she said the bastard and we both looked a little confused. (p. 9)

Okay, so yours is not a map of blood. But can't you see? This is a map of love.

This is not the true meaning of jihad," he spoke into the starless dark. "Jihad is the holy war we have within ourselves. That is the meaning below the surface. Our internal struggle for purity," he said with emphasis, pressing his forefinger into his chest. "It is the war of ascendance over our basal instincts. It has absolutely nothing to do with others. The only thing we can have control over is ourselves.

Religion is a thing of the past, the Party said, an instrument of oppression that keeps the common man in bondage.

If only I could rest for a time in quiet pain and awaken new and willing. He is looking forward and I am inward.

We come to know ourselves only through stories. We listen to the stories of others, we inherit the stories of those who came before, and we make sense of our own experiences by constructing a narrative that holds them, and holds us, together. Stories are how we make sense of our lives.

The smell of home was indistinguishable from the smell of leaving home: each inhalation a mix of familiarity and fear.