Hey you, long face,' shouted an elderly gent who must have been at least seventy years old, but who was dancing through the flooded, rainy streets, waving a rolled umbrella like a sword. 'Don't you si...
He was the child of a father who was not his father; but also the child of a time which damaged reality so badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again;
He wanted, for example, to investigate why one should hold fast to a religion not because it was true but because it was the faith of one’s fathers. Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe...
He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved...
Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unf...
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.
Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make l...
The true direction of her heart: that is to say, inwards, to the reality of dreams.
In words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfections.
Mourn for the living, the dead have got their camphor gardens.
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.
One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.
for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philoso...
There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
او از نسلی از بچههای جادویی بود که بسیار سختتر از نسل اول خواهد شد، بچههایی که سرنوشتشان را از پیشگویان و اختر شناسان نخواهند پرسید، بلکه آن را در کوره سهمگین اراده خود شکل خواهند داد.
They came in search of the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.
You will see, as time goes by, said Ibn Rushd, that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but...
You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.
Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?