Tayeb Salih Quotes & Sayings

You are entitled to wonder and to doubt - you're free. — Tayeb Salih

I have redefined the so-called East-West relationship as essentially one of conflict, while it had previously been treated in romantic terms. — Tayeb Salih

The day here is a something without value, a mere torment suffered by living creatures as they await the night. Night is deliverance. — Tayeb Salih

I entered the water as naked as when my mother bore me. When I first touched the cold water I felt a shudder go through me, then the shudder was transformed into a sensation of wakefulness. — Tayeb Salih

Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life ... — Tayeb Salih

We teach people in order to open up their minds and release their captive powers. But we cannot predict the result. Freedom - we free their minds from superstition. We give the people the keys of the future to act therein as they wish. — Tayeb Salih

Everyone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless state of childhood. — Tayeb Salih

I heard Mansour say to Richard, 'You transmitted to us the disease of your capitalist economy. What did you give us except for a handful of capitalist companies that drew off our blood - and still do?' Richard said to him, 'All this shows that you cannot manage to live without us. You used to complain about colonialism and when we left you created the legend of neo-colonialism. It seems that our presence, in an open or undercover form, is as indispensable to you as air and water.'

They were not angry: they said such things to each other as they laughed, a stone's throw from the Equator, with a bottomless historical chasm separating the two of them. — Tayeb Salih

I am no Othello, Othello was a lie. — Tayeb Salih

And when the sea swallowed up the shore and the waves heaved under the ship and the blue horizon encircled us, I immediately felt an overwhelming intimacy with the sea. I knew this green, infinite giant, as though it were roving back and forth within my ribs. The whole of the journey I savored that feeling of being nowhere, alone, before and behind me either eternity or nothingness. — Tayeb Salih

The important thing is that I returned with a great yearning for my people in that small village at the bend of the Nile. For seven years I had longed for them, had dreamed of them, and it was an extraordinary moment when I at last found myself standing amongst them. They rejoiced at having me back and made a great fuss, and it was not long before I felt as though a piece of ice were melting inside of me, as though I were some frozen substance on which the sun had shone - that life warmth of the tribe which I had lost for a time in a land 'whose fishes die of the cold'. — Tayeb Salih

By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe. — Tayeb Salih

I want to take my rightful share of life by force, I want to give lavishly, I want love to flow from my heart, to ripen and bear fruit. There are many horizons that must be visited, fruit that must be plucked, books read, and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed with vivid sentences in a bold hand. — Tayeb Salih

There is no room for me here. Why don't I pack up and go? Nothing astonishes these people. They take everything in their stride. They neither rejoice at a birth nor are saddened at a death. When they laugh they say "I ask forgiveness of God" and when they weep they say "I ask forgiveness of God". Just that. And I, what have I learnt? — Tayeb Salih

The blood of the setting sun suddenly spilled out on the western horizon like that of millions of people who have died in some violent war that has broken out between Earth and Heaven. Suddenly the war ended in defeat and all-embracing darkness descended and pervaded all four corners of the globe, wiping out the sadness and shyness that was in her eyes. — Tayeb Salih

I left him and took myself off, having become certain about a fact which was later on to cost me much peace of mind: that in one form or another I was in love with Hosna Bint Mahmoud, the widow of Mustafa Sa'eed, and that I - like him and Wad Rayyes and millions of others - was not immune from the germ of contagion that oozes from the body of the universe. — Tayeb Salih

Sooner or later they will leave our country, just as many people throughout history left many countries. The railways, ships, hospitals, factories and schools will be ours and we'll speak their language without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be as we were - ordinary people - and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making. — Tayeb Salih

Wad Rayyes, you're a man who talks. rubbish. Your whole brain's in the head of your penis and the head of your penis is as small as your brain. — Tayeb Salih