"The day Lily meets Lana is her two-week anniversary in Israel. She's lying on her belly in the dried grass outside the apartment building she now calls home, watching insects through her macro lens. She's sweating in her faded blue jeans and Converse high-tops. Then a shadow eclipses her sun."

"Years later, when they are old, sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea, someone would ask them how it all started, and he'd say, as soon as he saw her on the other side of the drinking fountain at the immigrant camp, he knew. (first lines of book)"

"It was my sister, Lizzie, who told me. Her voice-transmitted through telephone lines that ran underneath seas and borders from Sha'ariya, our Yemeni neighborhood at the edge of a suburb east of Tel Aviv, to this guesthouse counter in the Thai island of Ko Pha-ngan-echoed faintly. "Zohara," she said. Not Zorki, I noted. "You have to come home." You have to come home, a tinny version of her repeated."

"I woke up with an urge to write, to document everything [they] had shared with me about the women's songs. For the first time in forever, I felt inspired by something. The idea of oral poetry that was created and disseminated by a community of women fascinated me, the fluidity of it, the riffing and rewriting and borrowing, which stood against the idea of authorship as it was known and celebrated in the West. There was so much more I wished to know. (Chapter 14)"

"Maybe that's why the two of them felt so connected. Both waiting, both missing an integral part of themselves, the constant ache in their bodies throbbing like a phantom limb. (chapter 16)"

"Jerusalem, a city surrounded by thick forests and rolling hills, where the air was fresh and cool, where everything was ancient, biblical, suffused with meaning. (chapter 18)"

"On bad days, I looked at the paleness of the sky, and all I could see was how deeply fucked up everything was, how much the pain radiated from the earth, fury bubbling up like hot lava underneath the surface. Other days, mostly at the beach, I would breathe in the saturated air and be filled with gratitude. Despite everything, this was the only home I knew. Flawed, imperfect, but home. And though my sense of belonging was fractured, still I belonged here more than anywhere else. Maybe that's why I held on to this dream of peace so desperately. I needed to believe we were heading somewhere better. If peace came, maybe we would finally be able to let out the breath we'd been holding for forty-seven years, and exhale. (chapter 19)"

"Whatever resolve and certainty he had felt in the past few weeks had melted away. Strangely, there was some lightness in the unknowing, like a clenched fist had been unfurled. (chapter 34)"

"Growing up, I had often felt out of place in my own country, a feeling I couldn’t comprehend or name until much later. It had to do with my father; grief shakes the foundations of your home, unsettles and banishes you. It might have also had to do with the exclusion of my culture from so many facets of Israeli life, with not seeing myself in literature and in the media, with being taught in school a partial history about the inception of Israel that painted us as mere extras. Or perhaps that failed sense of belonging was an Israeli predicament, because how does one feel at home when home is unsafe, forever contested? When the fear of losing is so entrenched in us it has become a part of our ethos?"

"Theatre is almost the last place in the world of culture where living people meet living people."

"I was shocked to read about the barbaric practice of stoning women to death. I was surprised by its widespread use and by the huge number of women who were stoned to death since the Islamist revolution in Iran and recently in some other countries. But what surprised and shocked me almost to the same extent was the indifference shown by civilized nations and by the liberal democratic western states to this crime against humanity. Regimes that practice this crime of utmost savagery as part of their judicial system should be treated as criminal regimes and should be excluded from the United Nations."

"The reality of life is becoming more and more complicated to understand and more difficult to cope with. So there is a tendency to regress to the infantile stage in which you look for someone to take responsibility for you. Infantilism is manifested in all sorts of ways, such as the tendency to wrap oneself in a diaper to me, putting on a tallit [prayer shawl] is to wrap oneself in a diaper. For example, stickers that declare, ‘We have no one to rely on but our father in heaven’ and the like. Those slogans have become a national mantra signaling a danger of extinction. The moment a whole nation absolves itself of responsibility to look after itself and believes that there is a higher force that will do it, it can be taken over by all kinds of deviants and crazies."

"I cannot be associated with a publication that dumps a staff member simply because his work has upset some readers. Journalism, when done well, always angers some readers, and it is the duty of the newspaper or magazine’s editors and managers to stand by writers and other members of the staff when readers complain about the analysis and opinions expressed by its staff. This is all the more true in the case of editorial cartoonists, whose very job is satire—and a good satirist never pauses to worry about angering the citizenry."