Ayelet Tsabari

I know about death…Our country is haunted by its dead, weighed down by loss and remembrance.

I would wish that I was the one leaving because that would be better than being left behind

Home is collecting stories, writing them down, and retelling them. Home is writing, and it grounds, sustains, and nourishes me. Home is the page. The one place I always, always come back to.

Whatever resolve and certainty he had felt in the past few weeks had melted away. Strangely, there was some lightness in the unknowing, like a clenched fist had been unfurled. (chapter 34)

Home became the liminal space in between-between identities, between cultures, between languages- and I was content claiming that space as my own, pleased to be different.

Leaving, I discovered, did not cure my displacement, but rather reinforced it.

Maybe that's why the two of them felt so connected. Both waiting, both missing an integral part of themselves, the constant ache in their bodies throbbing like a phantom limb. (chapter 16)