Kamel Daoud Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Nobody's granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.

Kamel Daoud

#3. The sun was overwhelming, like a heavenly accusation.

Kamel Daoud

#4. Mother, death, love -- everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination.

Kamel Daoud

#5. I too have read his version of the facts. Like you and millions of others. And everyone got the picture, right from the start: He had a man's name; my brother had the name of an incident. He could have called him "Two P.M.," like that other writer who called his black man "Friday.

Kamel Daoud

#6. Now there were a few skirt-wearing, firm-breasted Algerian women who shuttled between our world and the world of the roumis, down in the French neighborhoods. We brats used to call them whores and stone them with our eyes. They were fascinating targets, because they could promise the pleasures of

Kamel Daoud

#7. And afterward, therefore, everybody bent over backward to prove there was no murder, just sunstroke.

Kamel Daoud

#8. In my head, every voice corresponds with a woman, a time of life, a concern, a mood, or even the kind of wash that's going to be hung out that day.

Kamel Daoud

#9. ...the devil's hour, two o'clock on a summer afternoon--the siesta hour.

Kamel Daoud

#10. Good God, how can you kill someone and then take even his own death away from him?

Kamel Daoud

#11. That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me.

Kamel Daoud

#12. you get offered the best liquors after your death, not before.

Kamel Daoud

#13. Silence. I hate that word. Its multiple definitions make a lot of noise. Every time the world falls silent, the sound of raspy breathing comes back to my memory.

Kamel Daoud

#14. I'll tell you this up front: The other dead man, the murder victim, was my brother. There's nothing left of him. There's only me, left to speak in his place, sitting in this bar, waiting for condolences no one's ever going to offer.

Kamel Daoud

#15. Technically, the killing itself is due either to the sun or to pure idleness.

Kamel Daoud

#16. 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

#17. The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness.

Kamel Daoud

#18. She lied not from a desire to deceive but in order to correct reality and mitigate the absurdity that struck her world and mine.

Kamel Daoud

#19. Maybe someone who dies at the age of a hundred doesn't feel anything more than the fear that grips us when we're six and it's nighttime and our mother comes in to turn out the light.

Kamel Daoud

#20. 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

#21. Mama's still alive today.

Kamel Daoud

#22. You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you;

Kamel Daoud