Camilla Gibb Quotes & Sayings

He wrote the future onto my face with his lips. — 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. — Camilla Gibb

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) — Camilla Gibb

It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs. And it is not simply what one remembers, or why, but what to do with what one remembers, which of the scattered pieces to carry forward, what to protect and preserve, what to leave behind. — Camilla Gibb

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. — Camilla Gibb

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. — Camilla Gibb

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

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. — Camilla Gibb

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. — Camilla Gibb

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. — Camilla Gibb

Clench clench these strong teeth in this strong mouth. My mouth. Of my body. In my house. My mouth? Chapped lips swollen and bloody? Dream dreaming wide and thunder? My mouth! My God! This is me speaking. Not mouthing. Not typing and twitching. Not writing a suicide note the length of a novel that will never be finished. I hear voices now but I know they are not the voices of fathers or lovers, or mothers or angels or demons, but the sounds of my own private wars echoing the battles of women before me and near me. No wonder I do not make people comfortable. I am a mirror. I have far too many things to say. (p. 237-238) — Camilla Gibb

But that is the thing about miracles: it is perception that determines them as such, not facts. — Camilla Gibb

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. — Camilla Gibb

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