Kamel Daoud > Quotes

“La religion pour moi est un transport collectif que je ne prends pas. J’aime aller vers ce Dieu, à pied s’il le faut, mais pas en voyage organisé.”
― Kamel Daoud

“On behalf of those you killed, imprisoned, tortured, you are not welcome, Erdogan!

No, Erdogan, you’re not welcome in Algeria.

We are a country which has already paid its price of blood and tears to those who wanted to impose their caliphate on us, those who put their ideas before our bodies, those who took our children hostage and who attempted to kill our hopes for a better future. The notorious family that claims to act in the name of the God and religion—you’re a member of it—you fund it, you support it, you desire to become its international leader.

Islamism is your livelihood

Islamism, which is your livelihood, is our misfortune. We will not forget about it, and you are a reminder of it today. You offer your shadow and your wings to those who work to make our country kneel down before your “Sublime Door.” You embody and represent what we loathe. You hate freedom, the free spirit. But you love parades. You use religion for business. You dream of a caliphate and hope to return to our lands.

But you do it behind the closed doors, by supporting Islamist parties, by offering gifts through your companies, by infiltrating the life of the community, by controlling the mosques. These are the old methods of your “Muslim Brothers” in this country, who used to show us God’s Heaven with one hand while digging our graves with the other.

No, Mr. Erdogan, you are not a man of help; you do not fight for freedom or principles; you do not defend the right of peoples to self-determination. You know only how to subject the Kurds to the fires of death; you know only how to subject your opponents to your dictatorship.

You cry with the victims in the Middle East, yet sign contracts with their executioners. You do not dream of a dignified future for us, but of a caliphate for yourself. We are aware of your institutionalized persecution, your list of Turks to track down, your sinister prisons filled with the innocent, your dictatorial justice palaces, your insolence and boastful nature.

You do not dream of a humanity that shares common values and principles, but are interested only in the remaking of the Ottoman Empire and its bloodthirsty warlords. Islam, for you, is a footstool; God is a business sign; modernity is an enemy; Palestine is a showcase; and local Islamists are your stunned courtesans.

Humanity will not remember you with good deeds

Humanity will remember you for your machinations, your secret coups d’état, and your manhunts. History will remember you for your bombings, your vengeful wars, and your inability to engage in constructive dialogue with others. The UN vote for Al-Quds is only an instrument in your service. Let us laugh at this with the Palestinians. We know that the Palestinian issue is your political capital, as it is for many others. You know well how to make a political fortune by exploiting others’ emotions.

In Algeria, we suffered, and still suffer, from those who pretend to be God and act as takers and givers of life. They applaud your coming, but not us. You are the idol of Algerian Islamists and Populists, those who are unable to imagine a political structure beyond a caliphate for Muslim-majority societies.

We aspire to become a country of freedom and dignity. This is not your ambition, nor your virtue.

You are an illusion

You have made beautiful Turkey an open prison and a bazaar for your business and loved ones. I hope that this beautiful nation rises above your ambitions. I hope that justice will be restored and flourish there once again, at least for those who have been imprisoned, tortured, bombed, and killed. You are an illusion, Erdogan—you know it and we know it.

You play on the history of our humiliation, on our emotions, on our beliefs, and introduce yourself as a savior. However, you are a gravedigger, both for your own country and for your neighbors. Turkey is a political miracle, but it owes you nothing. The best thing you can do”
― Kamel Daoud

“You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you;”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“As a matter of fact, that's the reason why I've learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish his sentences for him. The murderer got famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language. The murderer's words and expressions are my unclaimed goods. Besides, the country's littered with words that don't belong to anyone anymore.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use. This God — I like traveling in his direction, on foot if necessary, but I don’t want to take an organized trip.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“Nobody’s granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“I didn't want to kill time. I don't like that expression. I like to look at time, follow it with my eyes, take what I can.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“I’m so old that I often tell myself, on nights when multitudes of stars are sparkling in the sky, there must necessarily be something to be discovered from living so long. Living, what an effort! At the end, there must necessarily be, there has to be, some sort of essential revelation. It shocks me, this disproportion between my insignificance and the vastness of the cosmos. I often think there must be something all the same, something in the middle between my triviality and the universe!”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“Mother, death, love -- everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“But there’s something irreparable as well: The crime forever compromises both love and the possibility of loving. I killed a man, and since then, life is no longer sacred in my eyes.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“...the devil's hour, two o'clock on a summer afternoon--the siesta hour.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“That’s the best proof of our absurd existence, my dear friend: Nobody’s granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“Technically, the killing itself is due either to the sun or to pure idleness.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“Good God, how can you kill someone and then take even his own death away from him?”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“don’t fast, I will never go on any pilgrimage, and I drink wine — and what’s more, the air that makes it better. To cry out that I’m free, and that God is a question, not an answer, and that I want to meet him alone, at my death as at my birth.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“To be the child of a place that never gave you birth …”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“Why is it forbidden down here and promised up there? Drunken driving. Maybe God doesn’t want humanity to drink while it’s driving the universe to its place, holding on to the steering wheel of heaven”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“The sun was overwhelming, like a heavenly accusation.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“That cemetery was the place where I awakened to life, believe me. It was where I became aware that I had a right to the fire of my presence in the world — yes, I had a right to it! — despite the absurdity of my condition, which consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“Your Meursault doesn’t describe a world in his book, he describes the end of a world. A world where property is useless, marriage practically unnecessary, and weddings halfhearted, where it’s as though people are already sitting on their luggage, empty, superficial, holding on to their sick and fetid dogs, incapable of forming more than two sentences or pronouncing four words in a row. Robots!”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“But no, he didn’t name him, because if he had, my brother would have caused the murderer a problem with his conscience: You can’t easily kill a man when he has a given name.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“So Musa was a simple god, a god of few words. His thick beard and strong arms made him seem like a giant who could have wrung the neck of any soldier in any ancient pharaoh's army. Which explains why, on the day when we learned of his death and the circumstances surrounding it, I didn't feel sad or angry at first; instead I felt disappointed and offended, as if someone had insulted me. My brother Musa was capable of parting the sea, and yet he died in insignificance, like a common bit player, on a beach that today has disappeared, close to the waves that should have made him famous forever.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“What lunacy. Such gratuitous deaths. Who could take life seriously afterward? Everything in my life seems gratuitous.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“I find love inexplicable. The sight of a couple always surprises me, their inevitable slow rhythm, their insistent groping, their indistinguishable food, their way of taking hold of each other with hands and eyes at the same time, their way of blurring at the edges. I can’t understand why one hand has to clasp another and never let it go in order to give someone else’s heart a face. How do people who love each other do it? How can they stand it? What is it that makes them forget they were born alone and will die separate? I’ve read many books, and I’ve concluded that love’s an accommodation, certainly not a mystery. It seems to me that the feelings love elicits in other people are, well, pretty much the same as the ones death elicits in me: the sensation that every life is precarious and absolute, the rapid heartbeat, the distress before an unresponsive body. Death — when I received it, when I gave it — is for me the only mystery. All the rest is nothing but rituals, habits, and dubious bonding. To tell the truth, love is a heavenly beast that scares the hell out of me. I watch it devour people, two by two; it fascinates them with the lure of eternity, shuts them up in a sort of cocoon, lifts them up to heaven, and then drops their carcasses back to earth like peels. Have you seen what becomes of people when they split up? They’re scratches on a closed door.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“Everybody wants a village wife and a big-city whore.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“As for me, I don’t like anything that rises to heaven, I only like things affected by gravity.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“je lui parle comme si ma tête était une ruelle vide dans laquelle je peux la croiser, en plein jour d'été, sans inquiétude ni médisances, habillé d'une robe à fleurs, épaules nues pour faire briller le ciel, cheveux au vent comme une mémoire”
― Kamel Daoud, Zabor ou Les Psaumes