Zeitoun

Zeitoun

by

Dave Eggers

Zeitoun’s wife, Kathy was raised in a working-class, Southern Baptist family. She was married and quickly divorced at a young age. Feeling unmoored and unhappy, she began to learn more about Islam through her friend Yuko, and eventually she converted, finding peace in the religion that she hadn’t found in Christianity. Kathy is a loving wife and mother, as well as a crucial part of the Zeitouns’ business. She is prone to worrying about her husband, and she never fails to speak her mind to him or to anyone else. It is Kathy’s determination and refusal to back down that helps to free Zeitoun long before any of the other men he was arrested with.

Kathy Zeitoun Quotes in Zeitoun

The Zeitoun quotes below are all either spoken by Kathy Zeitoun or refer to Kathy Zeitoun. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Family, Community, and Home Theme Icon
).
Part 1: Friday August 26 Quotes

The banter they’d developed, full of his exasperation and her one-liners, was entertaining to everyone who overheard it. It was unavoidable, too, given how often they talked. Neither of them could operate their home, their company, their lives or days without the other.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Saturday August 27 Quotes

She knew that in Islam she had found calm. The doubt sewn into the faith gave her room to think, to question. The answers the Qur’an provided gave her a way forward.

Related Characters: Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3: Saturday September 17 Quotes

She had married a bullheaded man, a sometimes ridiculously stubborn man. He could be exasperating in his sense of destiny. […] But then again, she thought, it gave their marriage a certain epic scope.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Monday September 12 Quotes

Kathy often worried about the National Guard and other soldiers returning to the United States after time in Iraq and Afghanistan. She warned him about passing groups of soldiers in airports, about walking near National Guard offices. “They’re trained to kill people like you,” she would say to Zeitoun, only half-joking. She had not wanted their family to become collateral damage in a war that had no discernible fronts, no real shape, and no rules.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 252
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Tuesday September 27 Quotes

Kathy fell apart. She wailed and screamed. Somehow this, knowing that her husband was so close but that these layers of bureaucracy and incompetence were keeping her from him—it was too much. She cried out of frustration and rage. She felt like she was watching a baby drown, unable to do anything to save it.

Related Characters: Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Thursday September 29 Quotes

They held each other for a long moment. She could feel his shoulder blades, his ribs. His neck seemed so thin and fragile, his arms skeletal. She pulled back, and his eyes were the same—green, long-lashed, touched with honey—but they were tired, defeated. She had never seen this in him. He had been broken.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 289
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5: Fall 2008 Quotes

The Zeitouns have lived in seven apartments and houses since the storm. Their Dublin Street office was leveled and is now a parking lot. The house on Dart is still unfinished. They are tired.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 295
Explanation and Analysis:

Gonzalez talked about how the system is supposed to work: police officers investigate, make arrests, and then hand the process over to the judicial system. Under normal circumstances, if the men were innocent, he maintained, they would have been given a phone call and the opportunity to post bail. “They should have gotten a phone call,” he said.

Related Characters: Ralph Gonzalez (speaker), Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 304
Explanation and Analysis:

On the one hand, knowing that these two police officers had not purposely hunted and arrested a man because he was Middle Eastern gave them some comfort. But knowing that Zeitoun’s ordeal was caused instead by systemic ignorance and malfunction—and perhaps long-festering paranoia on the part of the National Guard and whatever other agencies were involved—was unsettling. It said, quite clearly, that this wasn’t a case of a bad apple or two in the barrel. The barrel itself was rotten.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun, Donald Lima, Ralph Gonzalez
Page Number: 307
Explanation and Analysis:

To dial a number given to you by a man in a cage, to tell the voice on the other end, “I saw him.” Is that complicated? Is that an act of great heroism in the United States of America? It should not be so.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun, Missionary
Page Number: 319
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Zeitoun LitChart as a printable PDF.
Zeitoun PDF

Kathy Zeitoun Quotes in Zeitoun

The Zeitoun quotes below are all either spoken by Kathy Zeitoun or refer to Kathy Zeitoun. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Family, Community, and Home Theme Icon
).
Part 1: Friday August 26 Quotes

The banter they’d developed, full of his exasperation and her one-liners, was entertaining to everyone who overheard it. It was unavoidable, too, given how often they talked. Neither of them could operate their home, their company, their lives or days without the other.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Saturday August 27 Quotes

She knew that in Islam she had found calm. The doubt sewn into the faith gave her room to think, to question. The answers the Qur’an provided gave her a way forward.

Related Characters: Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3: Saturday September 17 Quotes

She had married a bullheaded man, a sometimes ridiculously stubborn man. He could be exasperating in his sense of destiny. […] But then again, she thought, it gave their marriage a certain epic scope.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Monday September 12 Quotes

Kathy often worried about the National Guard and other soldiers returning to the United States after time in Iraq and Afghanistan. She warned him about passing groups of soldiers in airports, about walking near National Guard offices. “They’re trained to kill people like you,” she would say to Zeitoun, only half-joking. She had not wanted their family to become collateral damage in a war that had no discernible fronts, no real shape, and no rules.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 252
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Tuesday September 27 Quotes

Kathy fell apart. She wailed and screamed. Somehow this, knowing that her husband was so close but that these layers of bureaucracy and incompetence were keeping her from him—it was too much. She cried out of frustration and rage. She felt like she was watching a baby drown, unable to do anything to save it.

Related Characters: Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Thursday September 29 Quotes

They held each other for a long moment. She could feel his shoulder blades, his ribs. His neck seemed so thin and fragile, his arms skeletal. She pulled back, and his eyes were the same—green, long-lashed, touched with honey—but they were tired, defeated. She had never seen this in him. He had been broken.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 289
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5: Fall 2008 Quotes

The Zeitouns have lived in seven apartments and houses since the storm. Their Dublin Street office was leveled and is now a parking lot. The house on Dart is still unfinished. They are tired.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 295
Explanation and Analysis:

Gonzalez talked about how the system is supposed to work: police officers investigate, make arrests, and then hand the process over to the judicial system. Under normal circumstances, if the men were innocent, he maintained, they would have been given a phone call and the opportunity to post bail. “They should have gotten a phone call,” he said.

Related Characters: Ralph Gonzalez (speaker), Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun
Page Number: 304
Explanation and Analysis:

On the one hand, knowing that these two police officers had not purposely hunted and arrested a man because he was Middle Eastern gave them some comfort. But knowing that Zeitoun’s ordeal was caused instead by systemic ignorance and malfunction—and perhaps long-festering paranoia on the part of the National Guard and whatever other agencies were involved—was unsettling. It said, quite clearly, that this wasn’t a case of a bad apple or two in the barrel. The barrel itself was rotten.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun, Donald Lima, Ralph Gonzalez
Page Number: 307
Explanation and Analysis:

To dial a number given to you by a man in a cage, to tell the voice on the other end, “I saw him.” Is that complicated? Is that an act of great heroism in the United States of America? It should not be so.

Related Characters: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Kathy Zeitoun, Missionary
Page Number: 319
Explanation and Analysis: