Quotes from Denys Johnson-Davies

She's an old lady from times back. Her clothes have the smell of her sheep and that rusty smell of the ancient trunk in which she keeps her things.

The city had grown larger and had changed in every way, had in fact become one of the civilized cities, bearing the contradictory characteristics of large cities in every way: in the absurd and the beautiful, and in its clamor and strange and extraordinary ways, where the new and the old merged, and where strangers, with their different customs, had multiplied, while it was in a state between opening out, disintegrating, conserving, and taking root.

God had bestowed on him a snowy whiteness of complexion and an enviable determination.

That mansion, as it was called, brought on everyone who lived in it, or even went near it, a curse that was like that of the pharaohs.

I found him most of the time grave-faced, staring ahead of him, and eating frugally.

In his throat was the bitterness of morning.

The trunks of date palms met as though they were corpses mangled by the ants that had penetrated their leaves, while scraps of ripe dates, strewn about beneath them, gave out a fermented smell mixed with that of the date palms and the water-sodden roots.