Quotes from Hisham Matar

There is a moment when you realise that you and your parent are not the same person, and it usually occurs when you are both consumed by a similar passion.

He had seen the banning of books, music and films, the closure of theaters and cinemas, the outlawing of football, and all the other countless ways in which the Libyan dictatorship, like a crazed jealous lover, infiltrated every aspect of public and private life.

Nothing ever happens here. But when it does, it happens at the speed of lightning. You can change the world in a day. It might take forty-two years for that day to come, but when it does…

At that time I would read passages of Father's books or a newspaper article that I was certain he had read because I wanted to follow a trail he had taken.

I wanted everything good in the world for him; every dream he had, all of his secret plans, to come true. I suddenly was glad that Mona was his.

And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that 'knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.

If we were all engaged in some conversation, she would direct most of her contributions towards me, as if I were the front wall of a squash court.

History remembers Mussolini as the buffoonish Fascist, the ineffective silly man of Italy who led a lame military campaign in the Second World War, but in Libya he oversaw a campaign of genocide. The

It represented, in moments of desperation, the possibility of finally cheating myself out of exile.

there is a contradiction between what desire wants – complete conquest – and what it needs in order to continue to exist:

Desire is that animal that remains fit only through undernourishment.

evolutionary terms, failure is its prerequisite, frustration its generator.

The man continued looking at me, refusing to comment. Uncle Mahmoud tried to speak for him: "Who can blame him? He's tired of people.

The simple rule was never to refuse any one or thing in need. "It's not your job to read their hearts," he once told me after I claimed, with shameful certainty, that begging was a profession. "Your duty is not to doubt but to give.

Maybe he saw his imprisonment, removal from the army and temporary banishment as natural repercussions—perhaps even reversible—of the country's historical transformation.

Egypt's Second Division tournament. Every

Revolutions have their momentum, and once you join the current it is very difficult to escape the rapids. Revolutions are not solid gates through which nations pass but a force comparable to a storm that sweeps all before it. One of

The sun is nearly audible.

Muammar Qaddafi deposed King Idris

They dug up the graves and burnt the bodies," he said. He began to tell me of an elderly man in the town but then stopped. "Do you want to speak to him?" he asked. "Who dug up the bodies?" "Qaddafi's men, of course," he said in a mildly offended tone. "Reinforcements arrived in buses. The situation here is very bad.

In other words, one in every six inhabitants of the Libyan capital was kidnapped and made to disappear. The damage was more lasting because the Italian authorities selected the most noted and distinguished men: scholars, jurists, wealthy traders, and bureaucrats.

This surely is the way to be, I thought to myself, that one should take hold of those one loves most and simply look into their eyes for a long time, or perhaps, for eternity.

knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.

Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.