Daughters of Smoke and Fire Quotes

“Little by little, we began to understand that our mother tongue wasn’t the language of power and prosperity. At a young age, our alienation from Kurdish history and literature – from our roots, identity, and inevitably our parents – began, escalating with each year that passed.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“I could answer that question. Women who lost all reason to live wanted their internalized burning rage to manifest on the outside too. A dramatic death testified to an agonizing life.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Sitting across the dinner table was a man who had paid a massive price for hoping and trying for a just world, who had fathered and then neglected me, who wasn’t aware that the rage he harbored had killed all other impulses in him […] And here I was, sliding down a similar inevitable path.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“In the meantime, a massive and frightening bleakness inside me kept expanding and rattling. Sometimes I wrote about it in my diary, sensing that if I didn’t somehow fill the hollowness, it would swallow my heart and spit out my core. Other times I wished for the emptiness to scrape me off, a permanent erasure.
I was terrified that I was supposed to be living and I wasn’t, that I must have some prospect and I didn’t.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Time passed. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there among the flowers, behind a huge stone on the hill, fantasizing about a serene nonexistence.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Was engaging with world issues a defense mechanism to trivialize personal pain, or was I doing it to be aware and responsible?”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“The moral of the story is a large group of people should be deprived of one basic right so they won’t ask for their other rights?”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“No. People do not suffer equally in this or any country. Talking about our reality is not spreading hate. It’s inviting understanding.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Kurdistan won’t be free until women are”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“If I could pack my unhappiness into snowballs, I would throw them at these people.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Rich inner life, Chia had said. Rich inner life. One’s only reliable investment and the most loyal companion. I was slowly building one too.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“I swallowed, wanting to say something, but I didn’t know what. That he was a gifted storyteller? That I understood him well because I also suffered, even though my exposure to genocide and incarceration was secondhand? In fact, that was the problem. My imprisonment and motherlessness was figurative, his literal.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“In this country we are subhuman. We’re women, and we’re also Kurdish. I need some dignity, something to hope for.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Why fire? Why? Did you know that our region has the world’s highest rate of female self-immolation? There. We hold one international record. Despite our long tradition of having female rulers and governors, we’ve become a nation of burned women. I ask again, why fire?”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“The truth is that they don’t really want to kill us all. How else are they going to get people to vote for them if there isn’t some ‘enemy’ out there? I see it so clearly now.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“In the snow-blanketed alleyway, kids were playing with mitten-covered hands; a beautiful girl was perched on the hood of a parked car, flirting with a man whose tongue dangled out of his open mouth like a thirsty dog. A middle-aged neighbor was shoveling his driveway joyfully, bobbing his head and singing along with the upbeat music blasting from his radio. If I could pack my unhappiness into snowballs, I would throw them at these people.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“I bit the insides of my cheeks to swallow down my tears. Sitting across the dinner table was a man who had paid a massive price for hoping and trying for a just world, who had fathered and then neglected me, who wasn’t aware that the rage he harbored had killed all other impulses in him, chewing at the core of his compassion before spitting it back out. And here I was, sliding down a similar inevitable path.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“That’s why he had kept his stories to himself: his crippling fear of not being understood.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“I wondered what made one a Kurd and what made one half of that.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“I looked at his serious face as he rubbed my shoulder affectionately. He looked down at me reassuringly, and my anger and fear evaporated. Life is perhaps that enclosed moment when my gaze destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes. Indeed.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Dreams matter, Leila gian.” He nodded, stood behind me, and whispered, “Desires matter. Take them seriously.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“My lullaby passes through the concrete walls. Other prisoners, political and nonpolitical, are quiet. My lullaby soothes them even though not everyone speaks my language. Some sob like infants. “Ly-ly-ly-ly . . . Kazhollei chaw kazhallem . . . ly-ly-ly . . .”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“If the walls of Iranian prisons testified to what they had witnessed firsthand, God’s heart would shatter into a million pieces.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Arguing with the rules, complaining about your bad hand . . . none of that works. Shift your focus on playing your hand the best you can and notice the difference,”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“It's dark comedy, the way tiny tyrants demand democracy.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“what—one of my cellmates knows a lot of poems. I’ve been memorizing most of what he has recited for us. His poetry reminds me of the songs you used to hum. It’s such a joy, Leila. I never knew. Poetry is such a cure for loneliness. You see, if you’re stuck on an island all alone, somewhere deserted, you can recite poetry and lo and behold, poof! Loneliness fades away. When I am out, we will see which of us knows”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Mama’s tenacity and unmatched skills at getting on people’s nerves made the authorities promise to return the body under the condition that the deceased’s family signed documents under oath, guaranteeing that they would neither hold a funeral nor bury him during daylight. Even after all this, it took them days to deliver the body they claimed was Chia’s.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Joanna, it’s so hard to love parents who don’t know how to love. It’s even harder to love yourself when your parents didn’t love you.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“yearned to be a shiler, but I was a garden of anguish, of loathing, of torment; my occupied homeland was a birthplace of death.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“How long could I continue like this, crushed as I was beneath the daily cruelties faced by my people? Denied our language and history, policed and imprisoned, tortured and executed – when combined with my personal failures it was too much to bear.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire