My father looked down at himself and grinned. The look of sheer delight on his face was something I had never seen before, and I knew that I wasn‘t just seeing my father in a costume. I was seeing the man he would have become if only his life had gone differently. It was my graduation gown, but it fit him too” page 338
Sacrifice of a Father “Sitting in the stands because he couldn‘t play the game himself, cheering me on while no one cheered for him, then heading back to work after everyone else went home” page 338
Before I met Leisle, I was complacent but happy, and now, thanks to get, I was ambitious but miserable-not exactly my idea is a good trade. I found Leisle‘s ambition infectious, but I was already suffering from a long-term disease of my own: the fear of failure. The higher the ladder, the greater the fall. Page 311
“But I was so ignorant about girls that I was blind to my own form of prejudice. I felt like a biologist who had just discovered a new species; I probably told her that and impressed her again” page 303
What really made mathematics attractive to me was it appealed to my desire for justice. Math had clearly stated rules. I‘d you kept the rules, you were rewarded, and if you broke the rules, you were penalized. There were right answers and wrong answers, and they had nothing to do with the color of your skin or where you happened to be born. To me, math was an island of justice in an unjust world, and it gave me a way to finally stand out. Page 266
“Mathematics is a language of its own. A number is a noun and an equal sign is a verb, and it you know what those terms mean, you speak the language. The language of mathematics is a foreign language to everyone at first.” Page 266
“There is nothing in Asian DNA that produces accelerated mathematical ability, but there is something in the refugee experience that draws us to mathematics: our frustration with the English language” page 266
In America, to make money is difficult, but to starve us even more difficult” page 217
After all the wonders we had already witness, we just took for granted that a 190-ton chungo of metal fouls hurtle across the sky at five hundred miles per hour carrying us in its belly. Why not? If the pilot had told us we were going to make a quick stop on the moon, we probably would have believed him” page 216
“When you eat the fruit, remember who planted the tree” page 206
2/2 “...He returned from the dead to offer love and forgiveness to everyone who would accept it. it was the great love that brought Seasweep here, Stan told everyone. His great loved completed His followers to love and care for others. He loved, so we love; He gave, so we give back.“ Page 203
1/2 “To my father's surprised, Stan didn't talk about his noble organization or the selfless crew of Seasweep or even the details behind the rescue. Instead, he talked about Jesus: His love for the unloved, His compassion for the helpless, and His heart for all those whom society sweeps into the gutter. He healed the lame and blind He wept over the dead, and wrapped His arms around the untouchable. His greatest act of love was to die for us...“
In the since days since we left Malaysia, we had eaten nothing at all. It was the best meal any of us had ever eaten, and no future meal would ever be able to compare with it because that meal went past our stomachs and directly into our souls. Page 200
It would be the saddest thing to me, Princess. To walk separately from you, when the ground will let us go as we always did. Page 252
...even our blessings turned out to be curses; even the answers to our prayers were denials. Nothing made sense. We felt hopeless, helpless, abandoned by God and man-and my father was certain that this was the day we would all die. -pg 192
Yesterday‘s rain had brought a brief respite from heat and thirst, but it was almost worse than nothing at all. It seemed like a cosmic tease-not enough to save us, just enough to prolong our agony. My father had prayed for rain, and his prayer had been miraculously answered-but the storm that immediately followed almost sank our boat. Even our blessings turned out to be curses; even the answers to our prayers were denials. Nothing made sense...
My Grandmother admitted later, “We prayed to Buddha; we prayed to our ancestors; we prayed to Jesus. We prayed to anyone who would listen.” Apparently Someone did. -pg189
It was not the first time my father had ever prayed, but there was something very different about this prayer. There were no memorized words, no ritualistic postures, no petitions for help from enlightened beings or benevolent ancestors. It was an elemental prayer, stripped of all pretext and formality, just a creation speaking to its Creator.-pg 187
Refugees were not human beings; when they left their home, no list was made of who they were, when they left, or where they were headed. No nation mourned their departure, and no country awaited their arrival. There was death at sea but no death toll; there was heartbreak but no history. Refugees were unwanted, unclaimed, and unnamed-invisible people. They were just some country‘s former problem-out of sight, out of mind-pg184
The receipts they gave us were worthless pieces of paper. They were just like the worthless receipts the Nazis gave the Jews when they stripped them of their possessions before packing them into boxcars like cattle. The Nazis understood that bureaucracy has a calming effect when people feel out of control. -pg 175
The Malaysian government apparently decided that drowning was much quieter, and the sea offered the added bonus of not only killing the refugees but burying them too...No engines, no sails-not even an oar. These were not boats; they were floating coffins.-pg 168
How [can] fatigue descend into assault, abduction, and brutal murder? That was the fate of many women who sailed into the South China Sea, and the violence didn‘t end when their boats reached shore. Women were particular objects of violence during that period, just as they had been throughout history. Man‘s inhumanity to man can be appalling, but nothing compared to man‘s inhumanity to woman-pg162
Five years ago he was a prince, and now he owned a tarp. The wind had stripped him of everything he owned, everything he had ever wanted—but as he looked down at his dying wife and his frightened children huddled around her, he began to realize that the only things he had left in the world were the only things that had ever mattered -pg146
We are accustomed to emotionalism. But hunger is emotional, death is emotional, and poverty is emotional. Those who wish to make it all seem neat, clinical, and bureaucratic are the ones falsifying the picture, not us -pg93
My grandmother liked to be needed, and she knew that of all the ties that bind, purse strings do it best -pg79
“But as she ran toward the bridge [to commit suicide], baby Bruce began to cry in the house behind her, and when she heard his cry, she stopped. She knew she couldn‘t abandon him even if it meant she would have to go on living. She turned, walked slowly back to the house, set Jenny down, and picked up a broom” pg57
“No one can love you like I do.”
“Or hurt me as much.” Page 185
“If there is a heaven, we will find each other again, for there is no heaven without you.” Page 341
“For the rest of my life, I carried wounds that no man could see but were impossible to leave behind.” Page 117
“While my father offered advice, my mother offered comfort and love.” Page 12
“You barely looked at me,”
“I couldn‘t. You were the most beautiful girl I‘d ever seen. It was like trying to stare into the sun.” Pg 11
“Nothing is as fierce or imbed with goodness as the oppressed who have overcome their cowardly oppressor. It is these small women, scurrying around in their abbayahs, who will seize their justice from the jaws of the extremists and wrest their new place beyond the gender apartheid which is still the kingdom. The gender apartheid committed in the name of Islam is already dying, rasping it‘s last, soured breaths.” Page 436
“It is these same women who hold the keys to change...it is the voices of these mothers, wives, sisters, aunts, and daughters that we crave their voices that narrow men fear. It is women‘s voices that are becoming audible, women‘s actions that are becoming visible, and through their actions, Saudi women who are daily becoming more powerful.” Pg 436
“It is women who really opened the door to the society for me. Women who confides, women who guided, women who competed, women who disdained, women who were illiterate yet memorized the Quran, women who could repair aneurysms but could not make a three point turn, women who were objects of affection from even within their closed veils.” Pg 436
“Hesham stopped, sobbing for a long time. I listened, unable to bridge the gulf of grief and gender between us.” Pg 101
“Now my home, it was also my prison” pg 71
At the end of the day, God is our ultimate judge. He will make up to you every pain and loss that you have suffered. And if it turns out that these wicked people are not punished here on Earth, it doesn‘t matter. His punishments are just. You don‘t ever have to worry. You don‘t ever have to think about them again. Page 286
What this man has done is terrible. There aren‘t any words that are strong enough to describe how wicked and evil he is! He has taken nine months of your life that you will never get back again. But the best punishment you could ever give him is to be happy. To move foreword with your life. To do exactly what you want. Page 285-286
My mother always taught me that we needed to finish everything on our plates before we left the table. But I have to say that I am grateful for those people who threw away their food. Their scraps helped to sustain me for many months. Page 208
So why did God send me the water? Because He loved me. And He wanted me to know. He wanted me to know that He was still near. He wanted me to know that He controlled the Earth and all the heavens, that all things were in His hands. And if He could move the mountains, then he could do this thing for me. To Him it was a small thing-a terribly easy thing to do- but for me it was powerful as if He had parted the sea. Pg 132
When he talked of God, it was the creepiest thing you can imagine; the words of God coming from the face of the devil. It was the scariest thing I had ever seen. Pg 87
I don‘t know what it was that drive so many people to try to help me. It‘s beyond my ability to comprehend why so many good people were willing to work and to sacrifice for me, a little girl they didn‘t even know. All I know is that I am more grateful than words can express. And to this day I remain the luckiest girl in the world. Pg 67
We can choose to be taken by evil. Or we can try to embrace the good. Page 10
“How can you be fearless unless you don‘t care what happens?”
“Honey, how can you be fearless unless you do care? I care like hell about some things, and the things I don‘t care about don‘t rank on any fear scale at all.”
Faith and religion, they‘re timeless, right? So is a baseball game. It‘s the only major sport with no time limit. No clock running out. I love that. I love the timelessness of it.
“I have saved her only to see her die” pg442
“”Careful,” he says, and passes it to her. She dips in two fingers, digs up a wet, soft, slippery thing. Then he does the same. That first peach slithers down his throat like rapture. A sunrise in his mouth. They eat. They drink the syrup. They run their fingers around the inside of the can.” Pg471
“Bastian steps foreword. His face flares scarlet in the cold. “Give him another.” Again Frederick sloshes it onto the ice at his feet. He says in a small voice. “He is already finished, sir.” The upperclassmen hands over a third pail. “Throw it,” commands Bastian. The night steams, the stars burn, the prisoner sways, the boys watch, the commandant tilts his head. Frederick pours the water onto the ground. “I will not.”” Pg229
