Kamel Daoud Quotes & Sayings

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. — Kamel Daoud

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. — Kamel Daoud

The sun was overwhelming, like a heavenly accusation. — Kamel Daoud

Mama's still alive today. — Kamel Daoud

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. — Kamel Daoud

Technically, the killing itself is due either to the sun or to pure idleness. — Kamel Daoud

Maybe someone who dies at the age of a hundred doesn't feel anything more than the fear that grips us when we're six and it's nighttime and our mother comes in to turn out the light. — Kamel Daoud

I too have read his version of the facts. Like you and millions of others. And everyone got the picture, right from the start: He had a man's name; my brother had the name of an incident. He could have called him "Two P.M.," like that other writer who called his black man "Friday. — Kamel Daoud

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 — Kamel Daoud

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. — Kamel Daoud

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

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

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

Silence. I hate that word. Its multiple definitions make a lot of noise. Every time the world falls silent, the sound of raspy breathing comes back to my memory. — Kamel Daoud

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. — Kamel Daoud

Nobody's granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life. — Kamel Daoud

That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me. — Kamel Daoud

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. — Kamel Daoud

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. — Kamel Daoud

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

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

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

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

you get offered the best liquors after your death, not before. — Kamel Daoud

I'll tell you this up front: The other dead man, the murder victim, was my brother. There's nothing left of him. There's only me, left to speak in his place, sitting in this bar, waiting for condolences no one's ever going to offer. — Kamel Daoud

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? — Kamel Daoud

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. — Kamel Daoud