Ahdaf Soueif quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Ahdaf Soueif

Top Ahdaf Soueif Quotes

Browse top 26 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Ahdaf Soueif.

Favorite Ahdaf Soueif Quotes

1. "She had been wrong to think it wouldn't matter that much to him, yes,He took her for granted, of course he did , but he took her for granted - not like an old coat in the corner of a dark cupboard, as she'd put it to herself , but like the very air that he breathed ." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

2. "If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too?" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

3. "It was too cold to dream" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

4. "Every day she waits for night-time. She goes to bed at half past eight because that is the earliest time she can imagine going to bed and because that means that the day is officially over and she doesn't have to do anything more about it. About anything." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

5. "I'm taken over by this trunk. I'm practically living inside it. When I read the journals I feel as if I'm there, a hundred years ago. I'm putting together the whole picture and I know everything that happened and wasn't written down - Amal, p. 133" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

6. "And Egypt ? What is Egypt strenght?her resilience ?her ability to absorb poeple and events into the pores of her being? is that true or is it just a consolation ? a shifting of responsibility? and if it is true , how much can she absorb and still remain Egypt ?" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

7. "I haven't come to you only to take , I haven't come to you empty handed : I bring you poetry as great as yours but in anther tongue , I bring you black eyes and golden skin and curly hair , I bring you Islam and Luxor and Alexandria and Lutes and tambourines and date-palms and silk rugs and sunshine and incense and voluptuous ways" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

8. "That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the world better than it does the white waves that whip it , caress it , collapse on to it . The white foam knows nothing better than those sands which wait for it , rise to it and suck it in .but what do the waves know of the massed, hot, still sands of the desert just twenty , no , ten feet beyond the scalloped edge ? And what does the beach knows of depths, the cold, the currents just there, where-do you see it? - Where the water turns a deeper blue." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

9. "I watch and listen, helpless to help. There is no point in saying ‘This, too, shall pass.' For a time, we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

10. "Ya Ummi(my mother), I cannot live my life with a woman who has no key to my mind and does not share my concerns. She cannot - will not - read anything. She shrugs off the grave problems of the day and asks if I think her new tablecloth is pretty. We are living in difficult times and it is not enough for a person to be interested in his home and his job - in his own personal life. I need my partner to be someone to whom I can turn, confident of her sympathy, believing her when she tells me I'm in the wrong, strengthened when she tells me I'm in the right. I want to love, and be loved back - but what I see is not love or companionship but a sort of transacton of convenience santioned by religion and society and I do not want it." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

11. "Tell me, if you thought a man had a tendresse for you, but he wasn't doing anything about it. And you wanted to hurry him up a little so you made a move, an unmistakable move; one that nobody could pretend had been a misunderstanding. And he - he ignored it - ignored you. What would you feel?" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

12. "— and there, on the table under her bedroom window, lies the voice that has set her dreaming again. Fragments of a life lived a long, long time ago. Across a hundred years the woman's voice speaks to her — so clearly that she cannot believe it is not possible to pick up her pen and answer." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

13. "Palestinian weddings are celebrated over coffee, but when a young man is killed his mother is held up over his grave. 'Trill out your zaghrouda [ululation], his friends say, the shabab who might die tomorrow. A mother says to me: 'Our joy-cries now only ring out in the face of death. Our world is upside down.'"Under the Gun, A Palestinian Journey - MEZZATERRA: FRAGMENTS FROM THE COMMON GROUND" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

14. "There have been those among us who have been so dazzled by the might and technological wizardy of Europe that they have been rather a man who stands lost in admiration at the gun that is raised to shoot him." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

15. "Fields and more fields on either side of the road.From where they are it looks as if the whole world were green.But from higher up,from a hill-if there were a hill in this flat country-or from a pyramid(one of the many that two thousand years ago lined this route from Thebes to Memphis,from the Delta to the Cataract)or from an aeroplane today,you would be able to see how narrow the strip green was,how closely it clung to the winding river.The river like a lifeline thrown across the desert, the villages and the town hanging on to it, clustering together, glancing over their shoulders at the desert always behind them.Appeasing it,finally,by making it the dwelling of their head." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

16. "The encompassing silence and the ease(or difference) of my companions have left my soul free to contemplate, to drink in the wonder of this place. How fitting it is that it should have been here that Moses heard the word of God! For here,where Man -if he is to live-lives perforce so close to Nature and by her Grace, I feel so much closer to the entire mystery of Creation that it would not surprise me at all were I to be vouchsafed a vision or a revelation; indeed it would seem in the very order of things that such an epiphany would happen." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

17. "We're a bunch of intellectuals who sit in the Atelier or in the Grillon and talk to each other. And when we write, we write for each other. We have absolutely no connection with the people.The people don't know we exist." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

18. "Egypt.mother of civilization, dreaming herself through the centuries. Dreaming us all, her children: those who stay and work for her and complain of her, and those who leave and yearn for her and blame her with bitterness for driving them away." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

19. "It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved — turned this way and that, examined, considered." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

20. "But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you are running -panting- to catch up." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

21. "I now find myself looking at every sentence, every image, that purports to tell the West about the Arabs and the Muslims with this question in mind: to what extent does it feed into existing stereotypes and established prejudice?" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

22. "So at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow; the closer you are to the heart, the closer to the reversal. Nowhere to go but down. You reach the core and then you're blown away--" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

23. "You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

24. "and the thought of relieving my mourning, even slightly, for a moment filled me with a kind of fear." ~ Ahdaf Soueif

25. "I fancy he is attempting to purge himself of — all manner of things. I beg him to take heart, for our Lord surely watches over him as he watches over us all and God judges the actions of men but surely too He judges them by their hearts and their minds, else how can one act be held distinct from another? And surely that distinction He would make" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

26. "Put football instead of cricket and she could have been me. She could have been Arwa, or Deena or any of the girls I grew up with here in Cairo in the Sixties. What difference do a hundred years — or a continent — make?" ~ Ahdaf Soueif

Ahdaf Soueif Quotes Pictures

Ahdaf Soueif Quotes

Ahdaf Soueif Quotes

Ahdaf Soueif Quotes

<< Daniel MacIvor Quotes

Alex Borstein Quotes >>

Today's Quote

And it's what you never will write," said the Controller. "Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn't possibly be like Othello."
Author: Aldous Huxley

What Did Ahdaf Soueif Talk About?

Famous Authors

Popular Topics