Kamel Daoud Quotes

So Musa was a simple god, a god of few words. His thick beard and strong arms made him seem like a giant who could have wrung the neck of any soldier in any ancient pharaoh's army. Which explains why, on the day when we learned of his death and the circumstances surrounding it, I didn't feel sad or angry at first; instead I felt disappointed and offended, as if someone had insulted me. My brother Musa was capable of parting the sea, and yet he died in insignificance, like a common bit player, on a beach that today has disappeared, close to the waves that should have made him famous forever.

That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me.

I saw an astonishing spectacle down there: the roots of centuries-old trees, seen from the inside, so to speak, gigantic, twisting things, like giant, naked, suspended flowers. Go and visit that garden. I love the place, but sometimes when I'm there I detect the sent of a woman's sex, a giant, worn-out one. Which goes a little way toward confirming my obscene vision: This city faces the sea with its legs apart, its thighs spread, from the bay to the high ground where that luxurious, fragrant garden is. It was conceived - or should I say inseminated, ha, ha! - by a general, Gneral Letang, in 1847. You absolutely must go and see it - then you'll understand why people here are dying to have famous ancestors. To escape from the evidence.

don't fast, I will never go on any pilgrimage, and I drink wine - and what's more, the air that makes it better. To cry out that I'm free, and that God is a question, not an answer, and that I want to meet him alone, at my death as at my birth.

As far as I'm concerned, religion is public transportation I never use. This God - I like traveling in his direction, on foot if necessary, but I don't want to take an organized trip.

As a matter of fact, that's the reason why I've learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish his sentences for him. The murderer got famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language. The murderer's words and expressions are my unclaimed goods. Besides, the country's littered with words that don't belong to anyone anymore.

Mama's still alive today.

The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness.

She lied not from a desire to deceive but in order to correct reality and mitigate the absurdity that struck her world and mine.

...the devil's hour, two o'clock on a summer afternoon--the siesta hour.

On behalf of those you killed, imprisoned, tortured, you are not welcome, Erdogan!

No, Erdogan, you're not welcome in Algeria.

We are a country which has already paid its price of blood and tears to those who wanted to impose their caliphate on us, those who put their ideas before our bodies, those who took our children hostage and who attempted to kill our hopes for a better future. The notorious family that claims to act in the name of the God and religion - you're a member of it - you fund it, you support it, you desire to become its international leader.

Islamism is your livelihood

Islamism, which is your livelihood, is our misfortune. We will not forget about it, and you are a reminder of it today. You offer your shadow and your wings to those who work to make our country kneel down before your "Sublime Door." You embody and represent what we loathe. You hate freedom, the free spirit. But you love parades. You use religion for business. You dream of a caliphate and hope to return to our lands.

But you do it behind the closed doors, by supporting Islamist parties, by offering gifts through your companies, by infiltrating the life of the community, by controlling the mosques. These are the old methods of your "Muslim Brothers" in this country, who used to show us God's Heaven with one hand while digging our graves with the other.

No, Mr. Erdogan, you are not a man of help; you do not fight for freedom or pri

To tell the truth, love is a heavenly beast that scares the hell out of me. I watch it devour people, two by two; it fascinates them with the lure of eternity, shuts them up in a sort of cocoon, lifts them up to heaven, and then drops their carcasses back to earth like peels.

In my head, every voice corresponds with a woman, a time of life, a concern, a mood, or even the kind of wash that's going to be hung out that day.

I didn't want to kill time. I don't like that expression. I like to look at time, follow it with my eyes, take what I can.

Mother, death, love -- everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination.

And afterward, therefore, everybody bent over backward to prove there was no murder, just sunstroke.

Now there were a few skirt-wearing, firm-breasted Algerian women who shuttled between our world and the world of the roumis, down in the French neighborhoods. We brats used to call them whores and stone them with our eyes. They were fascinating targets, because they could promise the pleasures of

I know this from the hollow sound that persists after the men's prayer, and from their faces pressed against the window of supplication. And from their coloring, the complexion of people who respond to fear of the absurd with zeal. As for me, I don't like anything that rises to heaven, I only like things affected by gravity. I'll go so far as to say I abhor religions. All of them! Because they falsify the weight of the world. Sometimes I feel like busting through the wall that separates me from my neighbor, grabbing him by the throat, and yelling at him to quit reciting his sniveling prayers, accept the world, open his eyes to his own strength, his own dignity, and stop running after a father who has absconded to heaven and is never coming back. Have a look at that group passing by, over there. Notice the little girl with the veil on her head, even though she's not old enough to know what a body is, or what desire is. What can you do with such people? Eh?

Her type of woman has disappeared in this country today: free, brash, disobedient, aware of their body as a gift, not as a sin or a shame. The only time I saw a cold shadow come over her was when she told me about her domineering, polygamous father, whose lecherous eyes stirred up doubt and panic in her. Books delivered her from her family and offered her a pretext for getting away from Constantine; as soon as she could, she'd enrolled in the University of Algiers.

Good God, how can you kill someone and then take even his own death away from him?

You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you;