Yasmina Khadra Quotes & Sayings

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. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

He took a fine fresh fig from his pocket and washed it meticulously in a glass of water; then he peeled it open before our eyes. Inside, the beautiful fig was crawling with maggots. The imam concluded his lesson by saying, 'It's not a question of washing your bodies, but your souls, young men. If you're rotten inside, neither rivers nor oceans will suffice to make you clean. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

An aurora borealis rises over festive orchards; the branches of the trees immediately begin to bud, to blossom, to bend under the weight of their fruit. The child runs through the wild grass, heading for the Wall. It collapses like a big cardboard box, broadening the horizon and exorcising the fields, which extend over the plains as far as the eye can see ... Run ... And the child runs, laughing all the while, his arms spread out like a bird's wings. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

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 ... — Yasmina Khadra

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

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? — Yasmina Khadra

This isnt life, we just exist. — Yasmina Khadra

I was depressed. I knew I was lost, but I had no idea how to find myself again. It was as though I was a different person, an infuriating, disappointing yet indispensable person whose body was my only home. — Yasmina Khadra

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 ... — Yasmina Khadra

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

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. — Yasmina Khadra

This land does not belong to you. It belongs to that ancient shepherd whose ghost is standing next to you, though you refuse to see it. Since you do not know how to share, take your vineyards and your bridges, your paved roads and your railway tracks, your cities and your gardens and give back what remains to its rightful owners. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

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

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

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

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. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

In the final analysis,power is a misunderstanding: you think you know then you realize you have made a thumping mistake. — Yasmina Khadra

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

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

Life has rules, Omar, and without some of them, humanity would return to the Stone Age. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

Life is a train that stops at no stations; you either jump abroad or stand on the platform and watch as it passes. — Yasmina Khadra

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

You think you know. Then you lower your guard and act as though everything's just great. With the passage of time, you stop paying as much attention to things as you should. You're confident. What more can you do? Life is smiling on you. So is luck. You can afford your dreams. Everything's fine, everything blesses you ... and then, without warning, the sky falls in on your head. And once you're flat on your back, you realize that your life, your whole life - with its ups and downs, its pains and pleasures, its promises and failures, hangs and has always hung by a thread as flimsy and imperceptible as the threads in a spider's web. Suddenly, the slightest sound terrifies you, and no longer feel like believing in anything whatsoever. All you want to do is close your eyes and think no more — Yasmina Khadra

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

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

Of course, I'm aware of the animosities destroying brain cells on both sides, and I know all about the obstinacy of the warring parties, their refusal to reach an agreement, their devotion to their own murderous hatred ... . — Yasmina Khadra

It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here, from the land of the Pashtuns, where desertification proceeds at a steady, implacable crawl even in the consciences and intellects of men. — Yasmina Khadra

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

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

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

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

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 ... — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

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

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

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. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

Who dreams so much, forgets to live — Yasmina Khadra

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

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? — Yasmina Khadra

Her eyes were springs from which ecstasy drew water. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

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. — Yasmina Khadra

The three of us, each paralyzed in his own silence, contemplate the horizon, which the dawn lights up with a thousand fires; and each of us knows for certain that the rising sun of this day, like all those that have gone before it, will be incapable of bringing sufficient light into the hearts of men. — Yasmina Khadra

Whose truth do you want to know, Dr. Amin Jaafari? The truth of a Bedouin who thinks he's free and clear because he's got an Israeli passport? The truth of a serviceable Arab per excellence who's honored wherever he goes, who gets invited to fancy parties by people who want to show how tolerant and considerate they are? The truth of someone who thinks he can change sides like changing a shirt, with no trace left behind? Is that the truth you're looking for, or is it the one you're running away from? What planet do you live on, sir? ... Our cities are being buried by machines on caterpillar tracks, our patron saints don't know which way to turn, and you, simply because you're nice and warm in your golden cage, refuse to see the inferno consuming us. — Yasmina Khadra