Ahdaf Soueif Quotes

#1. In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules.

Elliott Colla

#2. I hardly trust myself to write about him. I do not know what I should write about him.

Ahdaf Soueif

#3. 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

#4. Could she ever know him? Could he ever know her? Or would they always hold fast to what they imagined of each other so that life together would for each be more lonely than life alone?

Ahdaf Soueif

#5. Their relation was that of the sand and water, they touch, they meet, they flirt but they never mingle together.

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. We always know how the story ends. What we don't know is what happens along the way.

Ahdaf Soueif

#8. How wonderful to simply do things instead of wondering if they are worth doing or discussing whether to do them or being told not to do them or listening to somebody else describe doing them.

Ahdaf Soueif

#9. From 1949 to the present, for every dollar the US spent on an African, it spent $250.65 on an Israeli, and for every dollar it spent on someone from the Western Hemisphere outside the US, it spent $214 on an Israeli.

Ahdaf Soueif

#10. 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

#11. This is now our life's work: we will create the Egypt they died for.

Ahdaf Soueif

#12. , living so close to Nature that everything you do is determined by her and each passing minute is felt rather than made use of.

Ahdaf Soueif

#13. How can it be that a set of shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?

Ahdaf Soueif

#14. 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

#15. There's a strength in that look, a wilfulness; one would almost call it defiance except that it is so good-humoured. It is the look a woman would wear - would have worn - if she asked a man, a stranger, say, to dance.

Ahdaf Soueif

#16. 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

#17. But I believe that even without the consideration of his family he would find it impossible to live abroad. He would be a man without a purpose; for his purpose, his vocation, is Egypt.

Ahdaf Soueif

#18. 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

#19. Wonder 'do we - by the same words - mean the same things?

Ahdaf Soueif

#20. A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall.

Ahdaf Soueif

#21. Can love grow infinitely? each day I feel my love for him push its roots into my soul. I rest in his arms, so close that I can feel his heartbeat as though it were my own,and I wonder that just four short months ago I did not even know him.

Ahdaf Soueif

#22. How much is our life governed by the lives and past actions of others?

Ahdaf Soueif

#23. Painting is a kind of visual poetry as poetry is a kind of verbal painting.

Ahdaf Soueif

#24. 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

#25. It was too cold to dream

Ahdaf Soueif

#26. 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

#27. And the thought of relieving my mourning, even slightly, for a moment filled me with a kind of fear.

Ahdaf Soueif

#28. - 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

#29. If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too?

Ahdaf Soueif

#30. 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

#31. And so the very thing that should make Egypt strong - the richness and diversity of her culture - serves to divide her and make her weak.

Ahdaf Soueif

#32. It was enough to see her face light up when we heard the sounds that told us my brother was come home, or to catch the sudden tenderness that came into is eyes when he looked at he, to realise the depth of the love that had grown between those two strange hearts.

Ahdaf Soueif

#33. It's good that I should have to come some way to meet you.

Ahdaf Soueif

#34. Then her story and the way she told it had touched his heart. That she should have tried to understand - to offer help - and been turned away so often. Oh, he would not turn her away, he would take what she had to give and count himself rich for it.

Ahdaf Soueif

#35. What's twenty years, fifty years in the life of Egypt?
As long as some of us hold on and do what we can.

Ahdaf Soueif

#36. 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

#37. Sometimes,because we use the same words,we assume we mean the same thing

Ahdaf Soueif

#38. Young people, they must struggle. If they don't strugglethey think life has no meaning. They feel lost. You see -' to Isabel - 'in countries where there is no need to struggle - in Norway, in Sweden - the young people kill themselves.

Ahdaf Soueif

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. Isn't that her problem? That she lets his thoughts crowd in on hers - crowd out hers ...

Ahdaf Soueif

#43. The air is dry and light and its effect on the mind is similar to that of a glass of Champagne before dinner.

Ahdaf Soueif

#44. What if you know yourself too well? What if you do not like what you know?

Ahdaf Soueif

#45. But she was not able to bring him peace of mind. It was as though he was angry that his happy private life should exist within the public circumstances that he hated. Or as though he longed that his personal happiness should extend to encompass all of Egypt.

Ahdaf Soueif

#46. - it was only then that I understood how longing for a place can take you over so that you can do nothing except return, as I did, return and pick at the city, scraping together bits of the place you once knew. But what do you do if you can never return?

Ahdaf Soueif

#47. Even God would say"Finish the task you have undertaken". He would never recommend breaking her mother's heart, damaging her parents' lives. "Your mother and then your mother and then your mother," the Prophet had said, "and then your father." But what about her own life? What is to become of that?

Ahdaf Soueif

#48. She wanted nothing to come between her and the rain and the sky.

Ahdaf Soueif

#49. So. Tell me. What do you think? Which is better? To take action and perhaps make a fatal mistake - or to take no action and die slowly anyway?

Ahdaf Soueif