The Hindus are busy letting themselves be seen riding in Cadillacs instead of smearing themselves with sandalwood paste and bowing in front of Ganpati. The Moslems would rather miss evening prayer tha...
Sunset is such a sad hour, she said, presently. If I watch the end of a day—any day—I always feel it’s the end of a whole epoch. And the autumn! It might as well be the end of everything, he said. Tha...
Still, he could not think of the mass of Moroccans without contempt. He had no patience with their ignorance and backwardness; if he damned the Europeans with one breath, he was bound to damn the Moro...
Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to mo...
One never took the time to savour the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and fatal, that there never would be a return, another time.
Once you accept the fact that life isn't fun, you'll be much happier, his mother said to him.
Many days later another caravan was passing and a man saw something on top of the highest dune there. And when they went up to see, they found Outka, Mimouna and Aicha; they were still there, lying th...
Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.
Everything's explained by the constant intervention of Allah. And whatever happens had to happen, and was decreed at the beginning of time, and there's no way of even imagining how anything could have...
Each Whining Thing (1929)When stripèd snakes shall creep upon usAnd the nervous screams of birdsMake silent all the fountains and the orchards and when theseHave caught upon the wing each wingThat flu...
And it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always wit...
You know what? he said with great earnestness. I think we’re both afraid of the same thing. And for the same reason. We’ve never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We’re hanging...
When I first came here it was a pure country. There was music and dancing and magic every day in the streets.Now it's finished, everything. Even the religion. In a few more years the whole country wil...
There have been times, what with this and that,when the whisper of words was not enough.On some shelf of memory lies a misplaced summer,one not stored away for later savoring.Surely it ended early, wi...
The idea that at each successive moment he was deeper into the Sahara than he had been the moment before, that he was leaving behind all familiar things, this constant consideration kept him in a stat...
The Americans are the nature of the future, she would announce in her hearty voice. Here's to 'em. God bless their gadgets, great and small, God bless Frigidaire, Tampax and Coca-Cola. Yes, even Coca-...
Tangier is a one-horse town that happens to have its own government.
But don't we all like to be overpowered, one time or another.
You know, everyone here's got some little peccadillo he's hoping to hide.
May Allah bless you. Or had she said: May Allah burn you? He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike.