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

“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

“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

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