kh > kh 's Quotes

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

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

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

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

“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

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand."

- Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina}”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I often carry things to read
so that I will not have to look at
the people.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems