Tahar Djaout > Quotes

“Silence is death, and you, if you talk, you die, and if you remain silent, you die. So, speak out and die.”
― Tahar Djaout

“Happy people have neither age nor memory, they have no need of the past.”
― Tahar Djaout, L'invention Du Desert

“The country has entered an era in which questions are not asked, for questions are daughters of disquiet or arrogance, both fruits of temptation and the food of sacrilege.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“The sweet sadness bequeathed by every day that leaves us behind has not yet been chased out of this country. But the course of time has gone crazy, and who dares swear to the appearance of the following day.
Will there be another spring?”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“As long as music can transport the spirit, painting can make the core bloom with a rapture of colors, and poetry can make the heart pound with rebellion and hope, they will have gained nothing. To affirm their victory, they knew what they had to do. They broke musical instruments, burned rolls of film, slashed the canvases of paintings, reduced sculptures to rubble, and they were permeated with the exalted feeling that they were thereby pursuing and completing the purifying and grandiose work of their ancestors battling anthropomorphism”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“By now they have no doubt burned all his books in an exorcizing fire. They understand the danger in words, all the words they cannot manage to domesticate and anesthetize. For words, put end to end, bring doubt and change. Words above all must not conceive of the utopia of another form of truth, of unsuspected paths, or another place of thought.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“That is perhaps the only way for him to set his grief free, to let it go away, be dissolved so that he himself can find some meaning in what surrounds him, in what continues to supplement him, in what life remains to him.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“Millionaires of every kind have discovered religious fervor. Among the believing masses and at a small price, they have acquired a respectability that erases all their activities and launders their money.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“How can those who want to fight meet when mistrust has been raised to the level of neurosis? You are afraid to reveal yourself to your neighbor, but also to your friend, your brother, and your offspring. Everyone is barricaded behind a bulwark of hypocrisy and artificial piety. When you are not sure of the reliability of the terrain, silence is the best complement to this armor. For the least little crack that shows, the least bit of a lowered defense can prove fatal. And the massive club of the Regulators of the Faith will then come and crush you like an ordinary dung fly who has the gall to settle on a cake.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“The warmth of the herd brings security, shows the lines of evidence, protects you against the icy stings of doubt. It marks the course; it gives the illusion of the straight path, the path leading from a noisy and coarse gathering toward the paradise of the narrowminded. The sheep that moves away from the herd immediately contracts mange. It is met with rebuffs, the imagery of suffering, the cursing rhetoric that dogma enlists to punish intelligence and divert its queries.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“You shouldn't spun the desert. It is the place of every Revelation. It is the cradle of prophecies.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“Couples! Can you really speak of couples in a society split in two, where one half is erased from view, denied, reduced to a receptacle, a place of pleasure in the guilt-ridden darkness?”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason