Hisham Matar Quotes & Sayings

Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih, is an eloquent and restrained portrait of one man's exile. It is a rare narrative in that it charts a life divided between England and Sudan. Without a doubt it is one of the finest Arabic novels of the 20th century, and Denys Johnson-Davies' translationdoes the original justice. — Hisham Matar

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. — Hisham Matar

A corrupt mind turns everything to its advantage. — Hisham Matar

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. — Hisham Matar

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. — Hisham Matar

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

One's nature is like a mountain — Hisham Matar

It is sometimes hard to escape the belief that history exists against the artist. — Hisham Matar

Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into. — Hisham Matar

Can you become a man without becoming your father? — Hisham Matar

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. — Hisham Matar

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

Is the heart always failing itself or by nature unfaithful?
I had to restrain myself from writing to her too often, especially because she rarely wrote back or responded with the speed and in the manner I had allowed myself to expect. Some people manage to escape the obligation a sincere letter places on them. — Hisham Matar

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

Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded — Hisham Matar

The three things that help writing the most are living, writing, and reading. In that order. — Hisham Matar

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. — Hisham Matar

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

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

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

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

I heard the stories and registered them perhaps the way we all, from within our detailed lives, perceive facts--that is, we do not perceive them at all until they have been repeated countless times and, even then, understand them only partially. So much information is lost that every small loss provokes inexplicable grief. Power must know this. Power must know how fatigued human nature is, and how unready we are to listen, and how willing we are to settle for lies. Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know. — Hisham Matar

It's one thing not to fear death, another to sing under its sword. — Hisham Matar

We are...two open pages of the same book — Hisham Matar

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 — Hisham Matar

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

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

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. — Hisham Matar

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

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. — Hisham Matar

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 ... — Hisham Matar

Books written out of fire give me a great deal of pleasure. You get the sense that the world for these writers could not have continued if the book hadn't been written. When you come across a book like that it is a privilege. — Hisham Matar

Naoma, and to the rest of the world she was Um — Hisham Matar