Quotes from Abdulrazak Gurnah

I'm not perfect. I'm unfulfilled.

Don't fear the dark places in your mind, otherwise rage will blacken your sight.

No,' I said, 'nothing like that. Just a lot of bits and pieces to sort out, bits of life.

And at school there was little or no time for those other stories, just an orderly accumulation of the real knowledge they brought to us, in books they made available to us, in a language they taught us.

the world always moves on despite the chaos and waste in its midst.

You have to talk about the things that cause you pain.

I was only rarely called upon to say anything in the open battlefield, although at times Emma looked accusingly at me and made me feel that I might have offered more support had I been of a less spineless constitution

I'm afraid, you're right...though not only of them. We'll lose everything, including the way we live,' Hussein said. 'And these young people will lose even more. One day they'll make them spit on all that we know, and will make them recite their laws and their story of the world as if it were the holy word. When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves.

I thought you'd come back to get married,' he said with a grin. 'Not to carry out an archaeological project.' 'Cut out that getting married stuff,' I said, and in this way we smilingly slid past the troublesome moment.

But I am so afraid of disturbing this fragile silence.

But yes, you can imagine, you must try. Nothing stands between us and atrocities but words, so there is no choice but to try and imagine.

My mother's father, Ahmed Musa Ibrahim, was an educated man, a travelled man, who had no time for these self-deluding patrician airs. He preferred to speak about justice and liberty and the right to self-fulfilment. He would pay for these words in due course. He had spent two years at Makerere College in Uganda and one year at Edinburgh University in Scotland, completing a Diploma in Public Health.

I was fourteen years old then and a person can feel old and wise at that age even when he really had no idea, and what he took for wisdom was only a precocious intuition arrived at without humility, just a little shit working things out for himself.