Ahdaf Soueif Quotes & Sayings

Every day she waits for night-time. She goes to bed at half past eight because that is the earliest time she can imagine going to bed and because that means that the day is officially over and she doesn't have to do anything more about it. About anything. — Ahdaf Soueif

If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too? — Ahdaf Soueif

Tell me, if you thought a man had a tendresse for you, but he wasn't doing anything about it. And you wanted to hurry him up a little so you made a move, an unmistakable move; one that nobody could pretend had been a misunderstanding. And he - he ignored it - ignored you. What would you feel? — Ahdaf Soueif

But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you are running -panting- to catch up. — Ahdaf Soueif

Self-evident, Sharif Basha thinks, laying down his pen. So self-evident as to be hardly worth saying. But Anna does not think so. Anna, when she sees a wrong, she cannot rest until it has been put right. Besides, she wants to make him happy. Not just happy at home, but happy altogether. He knows she imagines a day when the shadow within which their life together has been lived will be lifted. And she still has confidence in public opinion; that if only people can be made to see, to understand - then wrongs can be undone, and history set on a different course. — Ahdaf Soueif

But I believe that even without the consideration of his family he would find it impossible to live abroad. He would be a man without a purpose; for his purpose, his vocation, is Egypt. — Ahdaf Soueif

And Egypt ? What is Egypt strenght?her resilience ?her ability to absorb poeple and events into the pores of her being? is that true or is it just a consolation ? a shifting of responsibility? and if it is true , how much can she absorb and still remain Egypt ? — Ahdaf Soueif

She needs to leave him alone when he wants to be left alone. But then, do they meet in order for him to be left alone? Do they take trains and aeroplanesand drive for hours so that he should be left alone? If what he wants is to be left alone, then why do they meet at all? Everybody worries so about separation, but the problem is not the separations; it is how they are when they're together. — Ahdaf Soueif

There have been those among us who have been so dazzled by the might and technological wizardy of Europe that they have been rather a man who stands lost in admiration at the gun that is raised to shoot him. — Ahdaf Soueif

Then her story and the way she told it had touched his heart. That she should have tried to understand - to offer help - and been turned away so often. Oh, he would not turn her away, he would take what she had to give and count himself rich for it. — Ahdaf Soueif

You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like
Sartre and Camus and all that
they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not
mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell
— Ahdaf Soueif

I'm taken over by this trunk. I'm practically living inside it. When I read the journals I feel as if I'm there, a hundred years ago. I'm putting together the whole picture and I know everything that happened and wasn't written down - Amal, p. 133 — Ahdaf Soueif

The air is dry and light and its effect on the mind is similar to that of a glass of Champagne before dinner. — Ahdaf Soueif

Palestinian weddings are celebrated over coffee, but when a young man is killed his mother is held up over his grave. 'Trill out your zaghrouda [ululation], his friends say, the shabab who might die tomorrow. A mother says to me: 'Our joy-cries now only ring out in the face of death. Our world is upside down.'
Under the Gun, A Palestinian Journey - MEZZATERRA: FRAGMENTS FROM THE COMMON GROUND — Ahdaf Soueif

If we could shrink the Earth's population to a village of 100 people, with all existing human ratios staying the same, it would look like this: There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Americas and 8 Africans. 80 would live in substandard housing. 70 would be unable to read. 50 would suffer from malnutrition. 50 per cent of the entire world's wealth would be in the hands of only 6 people. And all 6 would be citizens of the United States. — Ahdaf Soueif

Old people are starved of touch: no husband, no lover, no child to slip a hand into a hand, to plant sticky kisses on nose and cheek and mouth, to snuggle and fit into the curves of the body. I watched my grandmother - my mother's mother - in her last years: her hand, the skin drawn parchmentlike over the bones, stroking, stroking, the chairs, the table, the bedspread. — Ahdaf Soueif

It was enough to see her face light up when we heard the sounds that told us my brother was come home, or to catch the sudden tenderness that came into is eyes when he looked at he, to realise the depth of the love that had grown between those two strange hearts. — Ahdaf Soueif

It's good that I should have to come some way to meet you. — Ahdaf Soueif

Fields and more fields on either side of the road.From where they are it looks as if the whole world were green.But from higher up,from a hill-if there were a hill in this flat country-or from a pyramid(one of the many that two thousand years ago lined this route from Thebes to Memphis,from the Delta to the Cataract)or from an aeroplane today,you would be able to see how narrow the strip green was,how closely it clung to the winding river.The river like a lifeline thrown across the desert, the villages and the town hanging on to it, clustering together, glancing over their shoulders at the desert always behind them.Appeasing it,finally,by making it the dwelling of their head. — Ahdaf Soueif

How can it be that a set of shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow? — Ahdaf Soueif

Egypt.mother of civilization, dreaming herself through the centuries. Dreaming us all, her children: those who stay and work for her and complain of her, and those who leave and yearn for her and blame her with bitterness for driving them away. — Ahdaf Soueif

The encompassing silence and the ease(or difference) of my companions have left my soul free to contemplate, to drink in the wonder of this place. How fitting it is that it should have been here that Moses heard the word of God! For here,where Man -if he is to live-lives perforce so close to Nature and by her Grace, I feel so much closer to the entire mystery of Creation that it would not surprise me at all were I to be vouchsafed a vision or a revelation; indeed it would seem in the very order of things that such an epiphany would happen. — Ahdaf Soueif

Painting is a kind of visual poetry as poetry is a kind of verbal painting. — Ahdaf Soueif

A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall. — Ahdaf Soueif

It was too cold to dream — Ahdaf Soueif

This is now our life's work: we will create the Egypt they died for. — Ahdaf Soueif

So. Tell me. What do you think? Which is better? To take action and perhaps make a fatal mistake - or to take no action and die slowly anyway? — Ahdaf Soueif

What if you know yourself too well? What if you do not like what you know? — Ahdaf Soueif

I haven't come to you only to take , I haven't come to you empty handed : I bring you poetry as great as yours but in anther tongue , I bring you black eyes and golden skin and curly hair , I bring you Islam and Luxor and Alexandria and Lutes and tambourines and date-palms and silk rugs and sunshine and incense and voluptuous ways — Ahdaf Soueif

, living so close to Nature that everything you do is determined by her and each passing minute is felt rather than made use of. — Ahdaf Soueif

Could she ever know him? Could he ever know her? Or would they always hold fast to what they imagined of each other so that life together would for each be more lonely than life alone? — Ahdaf Soueif

What's twenty years, fifty years in the life of Egypt?
As long as some of us hold on and do what we can. — Ahdaf Soueif

There's a strength in that look, a wilfulness; one would almost call it defiance except that it is so good-humoured. It is the look a woman would wear - would have worn - if she asked a man, a stranger, say, to dance. — Ahdaf Soueif

Do you realize,' Dr. Ramzi says, smiling broadly, 'when you speak of a political programme, that your programme now is the same that Mahmoud Sami Al-Baroudi's government tried to establish more than a hundred years ago?'
'Is that right?' Isabel says.
'Yes. Yes, for sure,' Dr. Ramzi says. 'Listen: the ending of foreign influence, the payment of the Egyptian debt -' he counts them off on his fingers - 'an elected parliament, a national industry, equality of all men before the law, reform of education, and allowing a free press to reflect all shades of opinion. Those were the seven points of their programme. These young people -' the wave of his hand takes in the group - 'they still ask for this.' He shrugs. — Ahdaf Soueif

I watch and listen, helpless to help. There is no point in saying 'This, too, shall pass.' For a time, we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal. — Ahdaf Soueif

The building is rather like a medieval Castle and was established in the Sixth Century and soon afterwards, as the Moslem armies advanced Westwards from the Arabian Peninsula, somebody had the prescience to build a small Mosque in its courtyard to guard against it being burned or demolished. At the time of the Crusades it was the turn of the Monastery to protect the Mosque, and so it has been down the ages, each House of God extending its shelter to the other as opposing armies came and went. — Ahdaf Soueif

- and there, on the table under her bedroom window, lies the voice that has set her dreaming again. Fragments of a life lived a long, long time ago. Across a hundred years the woman's voice speaks to her - so clearly that she cannot believe it is not possible to pick up her pen and answer. — Ahdaf Soueif

So at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow; the closer you are to the heart, the closer to the reversal. Nowhere to go but down. You reach the core and then you're blown away
— Ahdaf Soueif

From 1949 to the present, for every dollar the US spent on an African, it spent $250.65 on an Israeli, and for every dollar it spent on someone from the Western Hemisphere outside the US, it spent $214 on an Israeli. — Ahdaf Soueif

It can't be that bad. Surely it can't be that bad. There must be a way, only we can't see it yet. A way of making space for ourselves where we can make the best of ourselves - we just can't quite see it yet. But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you're running - panting - to catch up. How can you think clearly when you're running?..that is the beauty of the past..you leave it and come back to it and it waits for you - unchanged. You can turn back the pages , look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. — Ahdaf Soueif

It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved - turned this way and that, examined, considered. — Ahdaf Soueif

Isn't that her problem? That she lets his thoughts crowd in on hers - crowd out hers ... — Ahdaf Soueif

Even God would say"Finish the task you have undertaken". He would never recommend breaking her mother's heart, damaging her parents' lives. "Your mother and then your mother and then your mother," the Prophet had said, "and then your father." But what about her own life? What is to become of that? — Ahdaf Soueif

How much is our life governed by the lives and past actions of others? — Ahdaf Soueif

And so the very thing that should make Egypt strong - the richness and diversity of her culture - serves to divide her and make her weak. — Ahdaf Soueif

How wonderful to simply do things instead of wondering if they are worth doing or discussing whether to do them or being told not to do them or listening to somebody else describe doing them. — Ahdaf Soueif

Wonder 'do we - by the same words - mean the same things? — Ahdaf Soueif

Put football instead of cricket and she could have been me. She could have been Arwa, or Deena or any of the girls I grew up with here in Cairo in the Sixties. What difference do a hundred years - or a continent - make? — Ahdaf Soueif

We always know how the story ends. What we don't know is what happens along the way. — Ahdaf Soueif

That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the world better than it does the white waves that whip it , caress it , collapse on to it . The white foam knows nothing better than those sands which wait for it , rise to it and suck it in .but what do the waves know of the massed, hot, still sands of the desert just twenty , no , ten feet beyond the scalloped edge ? And what does the beach knows of depths, the cold, the currents just there, where-do you see it? - Where the water turns a deeper blue. — Ahdaf Soueif

Sometimes,because we use the same words,we assume we mean the same thing — Ahdaf Soueif

We're a bunch of intellectuals who sit in the Atelier or in the Grillon and talk to each other. And when we write, we write for each other. We have absolutely no connection with the people.The people don't know we exist. — Ahdaf Soueif

But she was not able to bring him peace of mind. It was as though he was angry that his happy private life should exist within the public circumstances that he hated. Or as though he longed that his personal happiness should extend to encompass all of Egypt. — Ahdaf Soueif

Ya Ummi(my mother), I cannot live my life with a woman who has no key to my mind and does not share my concerns. She cannot - will not - read anything. She shrugs off the grave problems of the day and asks if I think her new tablecloth is pretty. We are living in difficult times and it is not enough for a person to be interested in his home and his job - in his own personal life. I need my partner to be someone to whom I can turn, confident of her sympathy, believing her when she tells me I'm in the wrong, strengthened when she tells me I'm in the right. I want to love, and be loved back - but what I see is not love or companionship but a sort of transacton of convenience santioned by religion and society and I do not want it. — Ahdaf Soueif

And the thought of relieving my mourning, even slightly, for a moment filled me with a kind of fear. — Ahdaf Soueif

She had been wrong to think it wouldn't matter that much to him, yes, he took her for granted, of course he did , but he took her for granted - not like an old coat in the corner of a dark cupboard, as she'd put it to herself , but like the very air that he breathed . — Ahdaf Soueif

She wanted nothing to come between her and the rain and the sky. — Ahdaf Soueif

I now find myself looking at every sentence, every image, that purports to tell the West about the Arabs and the Muslims with this question in mind: to what extent does it feed into existing stereotypes and established prejudice? — Ahdaf Soueif

- it was only then that I understood how longing for a place can take you over so that you can do nothing except return, as I did, return and pick at the city, scraping together bits of the place you once knew. But what do you do if you can never return? — Ahdaf Soueif

He loves her. Circumstances and considerations - what are those? The whole world recedes and there is room for only one thought: he loves her. She had not misunderstood him. She is not an eccentric and a burden. He has been thinking of her as she has of him. Above her bed the broad fins whirl gently; the night will pass and the morning will come and he loves her. — Ahdaf Soueif

I hardly trust myself to write about him. I do not know what I should write about him. — Ahdaf Soueif

Their relation was that of the sand and water, they touch, they meet, they flirt but they never mingle together. — Ahdaf Soueif

Young people, they must struggle. If they don't strugglethey think life has no meaning. They feel lost. You see -' to Isabel - 'in countries where there is no need to struggle - in Norway, in Sweden - the young people kill themselves. — Ahdaf Soueif

Can love grow infinitely? each day I feel my love for him push its roots into my soul. I rest in his arms, so close that I can feel his heartbeat as though it were my own,and I wonder that just four short months ago I did not even know him. — Ahdaf Soueif

I fancy he is attempting to purge himself of - all manner of things. I beg him to take heart, for our Lord surely watches over him as he watches over us all and God judges the actions of men but surely too He judges them by their hearts and their minds, else how can one act be held distinct from another? And surely that distinction He would make — Ahdaf Soueif