Quotes from Ahdaf Soueif

it was only then that I understood how longing for a place can take you over so that you can do nothing except return, as I did, return and pick at the city, scraping together bits of the place you once knew. But what do you do if you can never return?

I hardly trust myself to write about him. I do not know what I should write about him.

I fancy he is attempting to purge himself of — all manner of things. I beg him to take heart, for our Lord surely watches over him as he watches over us all and God judges the actions of men but surely too He judges them by their hearts and their minds, else how can one act be held distinct from another? And surely that distinction He would make

We're a bunch of intellectuals who sit in the Atelier or in the Grillon and talk to each other. And when we write, we write for each other. We have absolutely no connection with the people.The people don't know we exist.

a trecut atata timp de cand nu i-a mai dat ascultare inimii ascultare inimii sale, ca aceasta a amutit.

And so the very thing that should make Egypt strong - the richness and diversity of her culture - serves to divide her and make her weak.

living so close to Nature that everything you do is determined by her and each passing minute is felt rather than made use of.

The building is rather like a medieval Castle and was established in the Sixth Century and soon afterwards, as the Moslem armies advanced Westwards from the Arabian Peninsula, somebody had the prescience to build a small Mosque in its courtyard to guard against it being burned or demolished. At the time of the Crusades it was the turn of the Monastery to protect the Mosque, and so it has been down the ages, each House of God extending its shelter to the other as opposing armies came and went.

What if you know yourself too well? What if you do not like what you know?

Their relation was that of the sand and water, they touch, they meet, they flirt but they never mingle together.

How can it be that a set of shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?

Young people, they must struggle. If they don't strugglethey think life has no meaning. They feel lost. You see -' to Isabel - 'in countries where there is no need to struggle - in Norway, in Sweden - the young people kill themselves.

This is now our life's work: we will create the Egypt they died for.

Thinking about it now, I see this as my first serious exposure to the 'with us or against us' mentality; the mentality that forces you to self-identify as one thing despite your certain knowledge that you are a bit of this and a bit of that.

Isn't that her problem? That she lets his thoughts crowd in on hers - crowd out hers...

But in today's world a separatist option does not exist; a version of this common ground is where we all, finally, must live if we are to live at all. And yet the loudest voices are the ones that deny its very existence...

The old language of colonialism surfaces once again.

He stands his ground but she can see him collapse. He looks like a man in a film the moment after he's been shot and before he falls to the ground -

Old people are starved of touch: no husband, no lover, no child to slip a hand into a hand, to plant sticky kisses on nose and cheek and mouth, to snuggle and fit into the curves of the body. I watched my grandmother - my mother's mother - in her last years: her hand, the skin drawn parchmentlike over the bones, stroking, stroking, the chairs, the table, the bedspread.

Could she ever know him? Could he ever know her? Or would they always hold fast to what they imagined of each other so that life together would for each be more lonely than life alone?

A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall.

Then her story and the way she told it had touched his heart. That she should have tried to understand - to offer help - and been turned away so often. Oh, he would not turn her away, he would take what she had to give and count himself rich for it.

What's twenty years, fifty years in the life of Egypt? As long as some of us hold on and do what we can.

She needs to leave him alone when he wants to be left alone. But then, do they meet in order for him to be left alone? Do they take trains and aeroplanes and drive for hours so that he should be left alone? If what he wants is to be left alone, then why do they meet at all? Everybody worries so about separation, but the problem is not the separations; it is how they are when they're together