Hisham Matar > Quotes

“Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“وفي بعض الصباحات الشتوية عندما تلتحف السماء بظلمة عنيدة، كنت أتسلل إلى سريرها البديل وأنا بكامل ملابسي المدرسية، ثم أتقوقع في التجويف الذي خلّفته في الملاءات وأتساءل وربطة عنقي تضغط على رقبتي، والدفء يسري في خدي من وسادتها، كيف للفردوس أن يكون شيئاً مختلفاً عن هذا؟”
― هشام مطر, في بلاد الرجال

“What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“My ideal man," Malak said ponderingly. "I'm not sure what that means. I don't want the ideal. I want complexity. I want passion. I want imperfection.

"My ideal man is not ideal. But," she said, leaning forward, "I'll tell you about him."

"I want him to have lunch at home. I want him to help me with my own mind. I want him to be bookish, wise, cunning, and exemplary. I want him to be a good storyteller, and always on my side."

"Yes, I want him to be near me. A good conversationalist, proud, not afraid of the lofty heights."

"I want him to be a singer, one who knows and loves a good song, can play an instrument, the oud or the ney, and preferably both. I want him to be a good mourner, know how to attend to the pain of others, a consoler who could assuage the grief I have for all those I loved and befriended and who are no longer here. I want him to be a healer, an expert in all that troubles me. I want him to be a fire that annihilates all danger that lies ahead and behind me and that which I have, somehow, without his help, found a way to avoid. I want him to be faithful---"

"Incapable of deception. I want him to be constant__"

"Constant in his love and in his prayers and, when those prayers are not answered, I want him to change reality with his own hands. I want him to be my lord-"

"For all the world to see. I want him to make me proud, to make vanish old and fresh longings, new and unremembered regrets. I want him to be vigilant-"

"To protect me from sorrows even once their great heights have passed. I want him to know how to deal with the past. I want him to be occasionally gripped by fear-"

"The fear of losing me. I want him to be patient, to help me to endure the injustices visited upon the houses of those I love. But I also want him to be impatient-"

"To lose all reason and hurry off, forgetting his shoes and hat, and ride-"

"His horse flanked by wings of angry dust, galloping, if need be, all night to find the traitorous, to change my fortunes and avenge me."

"And then I want him to return to me, to prosper by my side. I want to take him to the clearest stream, one only I know the way to, and there quench his thirst. I want him to look at me sometimes as if he does not know who I am. But I want to be forever recognized by him, come what may, to point me out in a crowd when, after the passage, we are reunited."


"I want him to see me when I cannot see myself.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.”
― Hisham Matar

“I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.”
― Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance

“My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future. Even if I had held his hand, and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense. I suspect many men who have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“Had the pain not been so precise
I would have asked
To which of my sorrows should I yield.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“This, I now know, is what is meant by grief, a word that sounds like something stolen, picked out of your pocket when you least expect it. It takes a long time to learn the meaning of a word, particularly a word like that, or perhaps all words, even ones as simple as “you” or “me.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“My silence made her say things she didn't need to say..”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“Can you become a man without becoming your father?”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“I must keep moving. To live is to act.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“There are moments, moments like this, when an abstract longing overcomes me, one made all the more violent by its lack of fixed purpose. The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and, although nothing does, we continue inside that dream. And, as in a dream, the shape of my days bear no relation to what I had, somehow and without knowing it, allowed myself to expect.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“In the end all that remains are numbers, the measurement of distances, the quantity of things.”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“I wanted this world to still. I wanted to fix it and be fixed within it. But everything was on the move, the clouds, the wind...”
― Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance

“... we ask of writers what we ask of our closest friends: to help us mediate and interpret the world.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“There and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.”
― Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance

“وفي بعض الليالي لم يكن ما أتخيله حسنا. فقد كنت أحلم بالانتقام، وأعيد تصوره مرارا وتكرارا إلى أن تسفر السماء عن تباشير الفجر الرمادي. كم كان يملأني هذا الشعور بالحاجة إلى أن أغدو رجلا بسرعة كبيرة، ولكن ليس لأقوم بالأشياء المرتبطة بالرجولة وامتيازاتها، بل لأغير الماضي، لأنقذ تلك الصبية من يومها الأسود.”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“The truest opinions are never uttered.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“I heard the stories and registered them perhaps the way we all, from within our detailed lives, perceive facts--that is, we do not perceive them at all until they have been repeated countless times and, even then, understand them only partially. So much information is lost that every small loss provokes inexplicable grief. Power must know this. Power must know how fatigued human nature is, and how unready we are to listen, and how willing we are to settle for lies. Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“How readily and thinly we procure these fictional selves, deceiving the world and what we might have become if only we hadn't got in the way, if only we had waited to see what might have become of us.”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“Perhaps the world is fair and balanced after all; no one gains and no one loses or no one gains and everyone loses equally.”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“She was older and all the more beautiful, had the weary tiredness of one who, in surrendering to her life, was ennobled by it.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“A corrupt mind turns everything to its advantage.”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“The world had to be sliced into hours to fill; otherwise you could go mad with loneliness.”
― Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance

“how to live away from places and people I love. Joseph Brodsky was right. So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured. But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right: never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow. What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“I remember thinking, this must be what it is like to be in love. Love as a place of rest.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“We are...two open pages of the same book”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men