Quotes from 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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

I am no Othello, Othello was a lie.

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.

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

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

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. He is no towering oak tree with luxurious branches growing in a land on which Nature has bestowed water and fertility, rather he is like the sayal bushes in the deserts of the Sudan, thick of bark and sharp of thorn, defeating death because they ask so little of life.

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.

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.

The fact that they came to our land, I know not why, does that mean we should poison our present and our future? 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.

How strange! How ironic! Just because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean? Where the middle way?

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?

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.

Everything which happened before my meeting her was a premonition; everything I did after I killed her was an apology; not for killing her, but for the lie that was my life.

I mean you no harm, except to the extent that the sea is harmful when ships are wrecked against its rocks, and to the extent that the lightning is harmful when it rends a tree in two.

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.

Has not the country become independent? Be sure, though, that they will direct our affairs from afar. This is because they have left behind them people who think as they do.

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.

I hear a bird sing or a dog bark or the sound of an axe on wood - and I feel a sense of stability, I feel that I am important, that I am continuous and integral.

Over there is like here, neither better or worse. But I am from here, just as the date palm standing in the courtyard of our house has grown in our house and not in anyone else's.

All this I had been a witness to ever since I opened my eyes on life, yet I had never seen the village at such a late hour of the night.