Yasmina Khadra Quotes

When dreams are turned away, death becomes the ultimate salvation ... .There are only two extremes in human madness: the instant when you become aware of your own impotence and the instant when you become aware of the vulnerability of others. It's a question of accepting one's madness ... or suffering it.

An isolated person is doomed beyond remedy." Yasmina Khadra, Swallows of Kabul

I just want to be able to live my share of existence without being obliged to detract from the existence of others. I don't belive in prophecies that favor suffering over common sense. I came naked into the world, I'll leave it naked, what I possess doesn't belong to me, and neither do other people's lives. All human unhappiness comes from this misunderstanding. You have to be prepared to give back what God has loaned you. No earthly thing belongs to you, not really. Neither the homeland you talk about nor the grave where you'll be dust among the dust.

Existence has taught me that a man can live on love and fresh water, on crumbs and promises, but he can never survive insults. And insults are all I've known since I came into the world. Every morning. Every evening. That's all I've seen for my whole life.

Get a grip on yourself. there's only one god here on earth, and that's you. If you don't like the world, make one you like better.

The one, true unique beauty is woman. The rest, all the rest, exists simply to adorn her.

You're all the world to me. Whenever i can't see you ... I die a little.

Posterity has never made the grave's embrace less cruel. It simply assuages our fear of death, because there is no better cure for out inevitable morality then the illusion of a beautiful eternity. But there is one illusion I still hold dear: that is the thought of an enlightened nation. That is the only future I still dream of.

If you haven't lost your mind yet, that's because you haven't seen very much.

Even though I was growing up in a land that had been tormented since the dawn of time, I refused to consider the world as a battlefield.

Sunset, springtime, the blue of the sea, the stars in the sky, all the things that entrance us exert their magic only in the orbit if woman.

You can know all there is to know about life and mankind, but what do you really know about yourself?

And ever since then, even though I was growing up in a land that had been tormented since the dawn of time, I refused to consider the world as a battlefield. I could see that wars beget wars, that reprisals follow reprisals, but I forbade myself to give them any support of any kind. I didn't believe in prophesies of discord, and I couldn't bring myself to accept the notion that God could incite his subjects to take up arms against one another and reduce the exercise of faith to an absurd and frightening question of power relationships.
And ever since then, I've trusted anyone who required a little of my blood to purify my soul about as much as I would trust a scorpion. I have no desire to believe in valves of tears or valleys of shadows- there are other more charming and less irrational features of the landscape all around me. My father said, "Anyone who tells you that a greater symphony exists than the breath in your body is lying. He wants to undermine your most beautiful possession: the chance to profit from every moment of your life. If you start from the principle that your worst enemy is the very person who tries to sow hatred in your heart, your halfway to happiness. All you have to do is reach out your hand and take the rest. And remember this: there is nothing, absolutely nothing, more important than your life. And your life isn't more important than other people's lives

The can take everything you own- your property, your best years, all your joys, all your good works, everything down to your last shirt- but you'll always have your dreams, so you can reinvent your stolen world.

I looked her up and down. She wouldn't meet my eyes. I didn't recognize her anymore. She was nothing like the image of her I had in my head. Her features meant nothing to me; she was someone else.

What's a house when you've lost a country?' she says with a sigh.

It wasnt fair..
3 days away from the beginning of the harvest,
2 days away from salvation,
a breath away from redemption.

I saved my soul, replied my father
For this, firstly, you should have one, old man

Amin, you're not making sense to me. Things have always been this way, since the beginning of time. Some die so others can be saved. You don't believe in the salvation of others?

And yet we were very much alike; we'd lost our souls, and we were ready to destroy others.

Was I still myself? If so, who was I? I wasn't really interested in knowing that. It had no sort of importance for me anymore. Some moorings had broken, some taboos had fallen, and a world of spells and anathemas was springing up from their ruins. What was terrifying about this whole affair was the ease with which I passed from one universe to another without feeling out of place. Such a smooth transition. I had gone to bed a docile, courteous boy, and I'd awakened with an inextinguishable rage lodged in my very flesh. I carried my hatred like a second nature; it was my armor and my shirt of Nessus, my pedestal and my stake; it was all that remained to me in this false, unjust, arid, and cruel life.

Was I happy after that? I think so. I experienced moments of pleasure, moments of unforgettable joy; I loved again and dreamed again like a wide-eyed boy. And yet I always felt there was something missing, something that left me somehow crippled, in short that I only every hovered on the fringes of happiness.

Music is the true breath of life. We eat so we won't starve to death. We sing so we can hear ourselves live.

A man's life is worth much more than any sacrifice, no matter how great. For the greatest, the most just, the noblest cause on earth is the right to live ...

When you can't find a remedy for your pain, you look for someone to blame.

Furthermore, I refuse to wear a burqa. Of all the burdens they've put on us, that's the most degrading. The Shirt of Nessus woudn't do as much damage to my dignity as that wretched getup. It cancels my face and takes away my identity and turns me into an object. Here, at least, I'm me Zunaira, Mohsen Ramat's wife, age thirty-two, former magistrate, dismissed by obscurantists without a hearing and without compensation, but with enough self-respect left to brush my hair every day and pay attention to my clothes. If I put that damned veil on, I'm neither a human being nor an animal, I'm just an affront, a disgrace, a blemish that has to be hidden. That's too hard to deal with. Especially for someone who was a lawyer, who worked for women's rights. Please, I don't want you to think for a minute that I'm putting on some sort of act. I'd like to, you know, but unfortunately my heart's not in it anymore. Don't ask me to give up my name, my features, the color of my eyes, and the shape of my lips so I can take a walk through squalor and desolation. Don't ask me to become something less than a shadow, an anonymus thing rustling around in a hostile place.

If a woman loves you, Younes, if she truly loves you, and if you have the wisdom to appreciate this great privilege, then there is no god to touch you.

Basically, being alive means keeping yourself ready for the sky to fall in on you at any time. If you start from the assumption that existence is only an ordeal, a test we have to pass, then you're equipped to deal with its sorrows and its surprises. If you persist in expecting it to give you something it can't give, that just proves that you haven't understood anything. Take things as they come; don't turn them into a drama. You're not piloting the ship, you're following the course of your destiny.

Somewhere it is written that I was born to leave my home, to constantly leave, each time leaving a part of me behind.

Misery is a dead end that stops at a brick wall. If you want to escape it, you must back out carefully, never taking your eyes off the wall. That way, it looks as though the wall is receding.

Her eyes were springs from which ecstasy drew water.

As long as the world's been the world, there's been those who live with it and those who refuse to accept it.

Why sacrifice some for the benefit of others? It's generally the best and the bravest who choose to lay down their lives for the sake of those who hide in their holes. So why favor the sacrifice of the righteous in order to permit the less righteous to survive them? Don't you think that's a way of weakening the human species? What's going to be left of it in a few generations if it's always the best who are called upon to exit the scene so that the cowards, the counterfeits, the charlatans, and the pricks can continue to proliferate like rats?

I hate wars and revoloutions and these dramas of redemptive violence that turn upon themselves like endlessly long screws and haul entire generations through the same murderous absurdities, apparently without ERROR signals going off in anybody's head.

We are the whole life that we have lived, its highs and lows, its fortunes and its hardships; we are the sum of the ghosts that haunt us ...

What to keep of all these reels of film, what to throw away? If we could only take 1 memory on our journey, what would we choose? At the expense of what or whom? And most importantly, how to choose among all these shadows, all these spectres, all these titans? Who are we, when all is said and done? Are we the people we once were or the people we wish we had been? Are we the pain we caused others or the pain we suffered at the hands of others? The encounters we missed or those fortuitous meetings that changed the course of our destiny? Our time behind the scenes that saved us form our vanity or the moment in the limelight that warmed us? We are all of these things, we are the whole life that we have lived, its highs and lows, its fortunes and its hardships, we are the sum of the ghosts that haunt us ... we are a host of characters in one, so convincing in every role we played that it is impossible for us to tell who we really were, who we have become, who we will be.

In the eyes of Popes and Imams we are Us and Them, but in the eyes of the Lord we are one.

For a man to think he can fulfil his destiny without a woman is a misunderstanding, a miscalculation; it is reckless and folly. Certainly a woman is not everthing, but everything depends on her.

But she was so happy in her gilded cage, wasn't she? She ate well, slept well, enjoyed herself She lacked nothing. And then, look, a bunch of mental cases turn her away from her happiness and send her to -- how did you put it? -- to 'blow herself away'?. The good doctor lives next door to a war but he doesn't want to hear a word about it. And he thinks his wife shouldn't worry about it, either. … We're at war. Some people take up arms; others twiddle their thumbs. And still others make a killing in the name of the Cause. That's life. … Your wife chose her side. The happiness you offered her smelled of decay. It repulsed her, you get it? She didn't want your happiness. She couldn't work on her suntan while her people were bent under the Zionist yoke. Do I have to draw you a picture to make you understand, or do you refuse to look reality in the face?

A brute is still a brute, even when smiles; the eyes are where the soul declares its true nature.

If you want your life to be a small part of eternity, to be lucid even in the heart of madness, love ... Love with all your strength, love as though it is all you know how to do, love enough to make the gods themselves jealous ... for it is in love that all ugliness reveals its beauty.

We're fine together, just like this: Our silence protects us from ourselves

We've already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we've forgotten it.

You're living through the only moments that make life worthwhile ... In love, even beasts become divine.

You`re happy, but you don`t know it. You`re even overflowing with happiness, and you don`t know how to rejoice in it. All your life, you`ve only listened to other people-your teachers and your holy men, your leaders and your demons-and they`ve spoken to you of nothing but wrongs and bitterness and war. That`s what your ears are filled with; that`s why your hands shake. And that`s why you`re afraid to listen to your heart right now and seize the opportunity that`s come to you at last. Listen to your heart. It`s the only voice that`s talking to you about yourself, the only counselor that knows the real truth. Its reasons are stronger than all the reasons in the world. Trust your heart and let it guide your steps. And above all, don`t be afraid.

Though there are things beyond our understanding, for the most part we are the architects of our own unhappiness.

Anyone who tells you that a greater symphony exists than the breath in your body is lying.

The stations of life are not places to inhabit. Rather, they are moments of opportunity that will not repeat themselves.

In vain I warned other Arab leaders, those pleasure-seeking gluttons who only listen to the fawning and simpering of those who owe them favors. There was a full complement of them at Cairo, lined up like onions, spying on each other on the sly, half of them so conceited they could not stop behaving like constipated patriarchs, the other half too thick to be able to look serious. Arrivistes who thought they had really arrived, comic-opera presidents unable to shake off their country-bumpkin reflexes, petrodollar emirs looking like rabbits straight out of the magician's hat, sultans wrapped in their robes like ghosts, disgusted at the blathering eulogies the speakers were trotting out ad infinitum. Why were they there? They cared for nothing that did not concern their personal fortunes. Busy stuffing their pockets, they refused to look up to see how dizzyingly fast the world was changing or how tomorrow's storm clouds of hate were gathering on the horizon.

The man who let the love of his life pass him by will end up alone with his regrets and all the sighs in the world won't soothe his soul.

This isnt life, we just exist.

The Afghan sky, under which the most beautiful idylls on earth were woven, grew suddenly dark with armored predators; its azure limpidity was streaked with powder trails, and the terrified swallows dispersed under a barrage of missiles. War had arrived. In fact, it had just found itself a homeland ...