Hisham Matar Quotes

And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that "knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.

Can you become a man without becoming your father?

I wanted this world to still. I wanted to fix it and be fixed within it. But everything was on the move, the clouds, the wind ...

Dreams have consequences. There is no turning back. A revolution is not a painless march to the gates of freedom and justice. It is a struggle between rage and hope, between the temptation to destroy and the desire to build. Its temperament is desperate. It is a tormented response to the past, to all that has happened, the recalled and unrecalled injustices - for the memory of a revolution reaches much further back than the memory of its protagonists.

There is a moment when you realise that you and your parent are not the same person, and it usually occurs when you are both consumed by a similar passion.

There and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.

When I first began writing In the Country of Men all I had was the voice of the protagonist. He intrigued me and my desire to want to know him and his world became almost compulsive.

Perhaps the world is fair and balanced after all; no one gains and no one loses or no one gains and everyone loses equally.

Naoma, and to the rest of the world she was Um

At that time I would read passages of Father's books or a newspaper article that I was certain he had read because I wanted to follow a trail he had taken.

One's nature is like a mountain

Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.

I didn't know you were going to be so beautiful, fill my heart..

I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.

Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.

There are times when my father's absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.

There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy

So old and persistent did Mother's unhappiness seem that I had never stopped to ask its true cause. Nothing is more acceptable than that which we are born into.

What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

The world had to be sliced into hours to fill; otherwise you could go mad with loneliness.

I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write.

I wanted everything good in the world for him; every dream he had, all of his secret plans, to come true. I suddenly was glad that Mona was his.

My silence made her say things she didn't need to say..

Had the pain not been so precise
I would have asked
To which of my sorrows should I yield.

How readily and thinly we procure these fictional selves, deceiving the world and what we might have become if only we hadn't got in the way, if only we had waited to see what might have become of us.

In the end all that remains are numbers, the measurement of distances, the quantity of things.