All My Rage Quotes

“I’ll survive this. I’ll live. But there’s a hole in me, never to be filled. Maybe that’s why people die of old age. Maybe we could live forever if we didn’t love so completely. But we do. And by the time old age comes, we’re filled with holes, so many that it’s too hard to breathe. So many that our insides aren’t even ours anymore. We’re just one big empty space, waiting to be filled by the darkness. Waiting to be free.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“I wonder what it’s like to be with someone who can love you through your rage.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“If we are lost, God is like water, finding the unknowable path when we cannot.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“Rage can fuel you. But grief gnaws at you slow, a termite nibbling at your soul until you're a whisper of what you used to be.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“Great passions grow into monsters in the dark of the mind; but if you share them with loving friends they remain human, they can be endured.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“She was not of my body or my blood, this child. But she was of my soul.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“But mostly it taught me that music can be more of a home than four walls and a roof.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“…I’m Salhudin. Sal.”
“’Sal’? No way … You make people call you by your name. If they can say Santiago, Alexander, Demetrius, and Ecclesiastes, they can say Salahudin.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“A mother carries her child's innocence in her memory. No matter who they become. We carry our hopes and dreams for them and such things are woven into our souls as God is woven into the fibers of this earth.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“People see what they want to. I'm sick of hoping that they'll see me.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“Anger doesn't really cover what I feel, though. You get angry because someone almost runs you over in the bike lane. Angry because someone cuts in line at Walmart.
What's the word for when someone drinks so much, they are ruining your best friend's life? Or the word for a man so vengeful about his own past that he wants to destroy your future? What's the word for a woman who was sick for months, but refused to go to the doctor until it was too late? The word for a girl at school whose personal mission is to mess with your head?
Anger 's not the right word.
Rage. That's what this feeling is, eating me up.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“How can you know someone for years and still not know their inner currents? I want to sink into the swirls and eddies of her ocean. I want to understand her. But I can’t unless she lets me.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“There's more to life than the things in front of you. . . Sometimes we hold on to things we shouldn't. People. Places. Emotionals. We try to control all of it, when what we should be doing is trusting in something bigger. If we are lost, God is like water, finding the unknowable path when we cannot.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“This life is jihad—struggle," Shafiq says. "Sometimes the struggle is more than any sane person can bear. I won't judge your father for his jihad, Salahudin. How dare I, when I couldn't begin to understand it?”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“Why does God do it? Why should we pray? Why believe at all?"
"Because what religion -- many religions really--offers is comfort when it's all too much. A reason for the pain. A hand in the darkness if we reach for it."
"What if it's not real? The hand? What if you reach for it, and it disappears?"
"I'm not going to tell you what's real and what isn't, that's for you to decide. But I do think that the hand is what we need it to be. Not what we want it to be.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“Who my child becomes is not the sum of what happened to him.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“Your father—my God, you were his pride and joy. He came home from work to feed you every lunchtime, even if it meant he barely got a chance to eat his own meal. He rocked you to sleep at night. He clipped your tiny nails so carefully that you laughed when he did it. I could not believe he ever thought he would be a bad parent.

You were my world. But to your father, Salahudin? You were the solar system. Bigger. The universe itself. “He will be a neurosurgeon,” your father said. “He will be a writer. He will be an architect.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“I don't know if I believe in hell, but if it had a sound, it would be the strangled howl of your father finally realizing that the love of his life is being put into the ground.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“You do not re-enter your home until your guest is on the way to their own.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“But I’ve never been great at staying angry. My memory eats at the edges of it.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“The chaiwallah brought sabz chai, Kashmiri-style. It was pink and milky, sprinkled with cardamom and brimming with crushed pistachios and almonds. A romantic tea, I always thought.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“All my rage seethes inside me and there’s no place for it to go. I thrash. I scream. I snarl and bite. I let it course through me. I let it take me.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“I was eighteen. Full of fear. I should have prayed instead for a man unbroken.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“I think about the shit we've read in school. Those books all about one problem. A kid who's bullied. A kid who's beaten. A kid who's poor. And I think of us and how we've won the shit-luck lottery. We have all the problems.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“Some habits are stronger than instinct.
Fear. Habit. Despair.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“The more you ask for," she'd say, "the better. Because it means you put your faith in something greater than yourself.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“But there’s a hole in me, never to be filled. Maybe that’s why people die of old age. Maybe we could live forever if we didn’t love so completely. But we do. And by the time old age comes, we’re filled with holes, so many that it’s too hard to breathe. So many that our insides aren’t even ours anymore. We’re just one big empty space, waiting to be filled by the darkness. Waiting to be free.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“Woh harh jagah mojood heh. Iss ghar keh dar-o-diwar bhee rotay-henh.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“People love talking about the greatness of the human heart. No bigger than a fist, pumps two thousand gallons of blood a day. Et cetera.
But the human heart is also stupid. At least mine is. No matter how many times I tell it not to hope that Chachu cares about me, it hopes anyway.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

“One day my ama will die. Everything that she ever was will die with her. The way she walked quickly, and flour in her hair when she made roti, the lines in her forehead when she yelled at me for doing something stupid. Her Saturday morning parathas and her smell, cardamom and Pine-sol and lotion.”
― Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage