It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping collar, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.

— Hannah Lillith Assadi

I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.

— Hannah Lillith Assadi

I wanted to walk faster, to run, far as possible from her, from my entire life, from the first day I ever saw her always just a few steps ahead.

— Hannah Lillith Assadi

I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.

— Hannah Lillith Assadi

Like hunting for a dead beloved's face among the living, in places, we find the place we loved before.

— Hannah Lillith Assadi

Look at the lonely fisherman,' my father says.' Look at his view,' my mother says.

— Hannah Lillith Assadi

My brain came alight with tenderness for her. I felt so sorry for everything. I yearned to embrace her, kiss her even, to stay with her, always her, my sister, my friend to the end. It was a story after all, even if a sick one. It was completely ours.

— Hannah Lillith Assadi

My father, a Palestinian, and my mother, an Israeli, met in a bar in New York. Their encounter was a blue shift. An anomaly. A collision. In the end, I understand, it is only for this we live. All I ever wanted was to love.

— Hannah Lillith Assadi

My father insisted I eat red meat. 'You'll lose your brain without food,' he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.

— Hannah Lillith Assadi

My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war.

— Hannah Lillith Assadi