Ruth Ahmed Quotes

Her English was sweet, an effort for her, anachronistic and unpractised.

The sadness began later, in waves as crushing as the contractions had been,

Honour, in her modern self-confidence, had grown up never having to face actual raw, passionate, drop-down-dead-hostility. She didn't really understand what was going to happen,

There is something so special in the early leaves drifting from the trees - as if we are all to be allowed a chance to peel, to refresh, to start again.

I wanted my eternity in carbon molecules, in being part of the trees, the sky, air itself

When I was a child I burnt the back of my right hand on a hot iron. I can't recall the pain, but there's an eye-shaped scar as testament to it. As a teenager I used to think it was the all seeing eye of the anti-Christ and that I was the devil incarnate. Or at least a minion. It was my right hand, innit?What I do remember though is my father, or Dad as we called him, abandoning the polite Abbu, telling me not to cry and to be patient because the fires of hell were seventy times hotter than the fire of the iron.

The evening that Al and I met became the night that we met. By the time we fell asleep at daybreak we were different people

I drank in his smell, I'd missed him so much more than I'd realised. Despite dreaming of him every night, besides my secret habit of writing Honour Hussain in curled scripts on every scrap piece of paper, I surprised myself by how much I needed him.