Quotes from Hisham Matar

Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.

I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.

What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded

My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future. Even if I had held his hand, and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense. I suspect many men who have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.

Can you become a man without becoming your father?

My silence made her say things she didn't need to say..

There and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.

In the end all that remains are numbers, the measurement of distances, the quantity of things.

I wanted this world to still. I wanted to fix it and be fixed within it. But everything was on the move, the clouds, the wind...

Perhaps the world is fair and balanced after all; no one gains and no one loses or no one gains and everyone loses equally.

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.

Had the pain not been so precise I would have asked To which of my sorrows should I yield.

How readily and thinly we procure these fictional selves, deceiving the world and what we might have become if only we hadn't got in the way, if only we had waited to see what might have become of us.

The world had to be sliced into hours to fill; otherwise you could go mad with loneliness.

A corrupt mind turns everything to its advantage.

We are...two open pages of the same book

Is the heart always failing itself or by nature unfaithful? I had to restrain myself from writing to her too often, especially because she rarely wrote back or responded with the speed and in the manner I had allowed myself to expect. Some people manage to escape the obligation a sincere letter places on them.

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.

There are times when my father's absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.

There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy

She said, 'Aren't you frightened for your daughter?' I told her, 'It is exactly because I am afraid for my daughter's future that I am going out.'

So old and persistent did Mother's unhappiness seem that I had never stopped to ask its true cause. Nothing is more acceptable than that which we are born into.

Naoma, and to the rest of the world she was Um