Hassan Blasim > Quotes

“You can't understand beauty without peace of mind and you can't get close to the truth without fear.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Iraqi Christ

“...I believe in dreams more than I believe in God. Dreams get into you and leave, then come back with new fruit, but God is just a vast desert.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Iraqi Christ

“Spilled blood and superstition are the basis of the world. Man is not the only creature who kills for bread, or love, or power, because animals in the jungle do that in various ways, but he is the only creature who kills because of faith.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“The pleasure I found in reading books was disconcerting...I felt anxious about every new piece of information. I would latch onto one particular detail and start look for references and other versions of it in other writings. I remembered, for example, that for quite some time I tracked down the subject of kissing. I read and read and felt dizzy with the subject, as if I had eaten a psychotropic fruit.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Iraqi Christ

“The dead, Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, as you know.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“Every man has both a poetic obligation and a human obligation.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“I wanted to reach back to other times I might have lived in, the traces of which are scattered to places I previously thought imaginary.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“The question of humanity can be solved only by constant dread.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“The dead, Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, as you know. If from time to time we hear the opposite, then those are just trivial religious and poetical exaggerations and ridiculous rumors, which have nothing to do with the real circumstances of the simple dead.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“I don’t recall ever seeing my mother as a human being. She would always be weeping and wailing in the corner of the kitchen like a dog tied up to be tormented. My father would assail her with a hail of insults, and when her endurance broke, she would whine aloud, ‘Why good Lord? Why? Take me and save me.’ Only then would my father stand up, take the cord out of his headdress, and whip her nonstop for half an hour, spitting at her throughout.”
― Hassan Blasim

“He sent you a text message that read: FIre Sign - You're compatible with all signs. Your blood group breathes disappointment and happiness. You stick your tongue in the woman's mouth in order to cool down. The fog that burns on the ceiling is the steam of sweat. You buy pins and colored pictures from the shop. You pin them on your flesh when you receive a guest. The firewood comes to you throughout the night, wrapped in nightmares. When you wake up you have a bath on fire. You eat on fire. You read the newspapers on fire. You smoke a cigarette on fire. In the coffee cup you come across prophecies of fire. You laugh on fire. You have your lungs checked at the hospital, and they find a spring of errors that looks like a tumor. You dream of the final act: It goes out.”
― Hassan Blasim Jonathan Wright, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“Then he thrust the knife into my stomach and said:
"You're shaking.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“Едва минал през контролно- пропусквателния пункт, едва на една педя оттатък, усетих, че никога повече няма да се върна в Багдад...”
― Hassan Blasim, The Madman of Freedom Square

“There's no need to kick him in the balls for him to tell the story honestly and impartially, because the dead are usually honest, even the bastards among them.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“Every generation yearns for the past. The father says that his time was the best. The grandfather says that his was the best. This leaves us forever romanticising the past and singing its praises until we find ourselves reliving it; this is why we ended up bearing the same names and surnames we used five thousand years before.”
― Hassan Blasim, Iraq + 100: The First Anthology of Science Fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq

“The operation would be in a week...I didn't know if I would survive. How I longed to go back to reading! There was nowhere I longed to be more than the university campus. I was preparing for a master's on fantasy literature. I was interested in why the country's literature did not include this distinctive genre. I had this great passion for studying and writing, which they explained in my household with the story of the umbilical cord. When I was born, and at my father's request, my elder sister buried my umbilical cord in the courtyard of her primary school. My father attributed my {brother's} academic failure to the fact that my mother buried his umbilical cord in the garden of our house.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Iraqi Christ

“ZHRAA ALHABOBY”
― Hassan Blasim, Iraq + 100: The First Anthology of Science Fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq

“On more than one occasion I heard how life apparently advances, moves on, sets sail or, at worst, apparently crawls slowly forward. My life, on the other hand, simply exploded like a firecracker in the hand of God, a small flare in his mighty firmament of bombardment.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Iraqi Christ

“ستكتشف تدريجياً أن العالم مُشيَد من أكثر من طابق, و ليس من المنطق ان يصل الجميع الى كل الطوابق و السراديب بسهولة”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“Elämä on lahja, nautinnonväristys, ja se on sitä yhtä hyvin teikäläiselle kuin torakallekin. Kokee väristyksen sitten vankilassa tai vapaana, mielikuvituksen määrästä riippuu, miten kukin nappula elämän pelilaudalla väristyksensä kokee.”
― Hassan Blasim, Allah99

“It's bullshit what that bullshitter says. A story's a story, whether it's beautiful or bullshit.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq