The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street; Introduction by Sabry Hafez (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series Book 248)

by Naguib Mahfouz

“Pleasure’s my recreation, but ascending rugged mountains is still my objective. Aïda’s gone. So I must create a new Aïda exemplifying everything she meant to me. Otherwise you should abandon life with no regrets.”

“Haste is from the devil. The important thing’s for you to be ready for what you want when you leave here.” What did he want? Was it one of those women who inspired disgust and aversion when he was sober? Would alcohol sweeten the bitter sacrifice of his dignity? He had once fought off instinct by appealing to religion and to Aïda. Now instinct was free to express itself. But there was another incentive for this adventure. He wanted to investigate woman, the mysterious species that included Aïda herself.

“Contrary to what you think, there’s no conflict between thought and wealth. Philosophy flourished in ancient Greece when some gentlemen were able to devote themselves to learning because they weren’t preoccupied by earning a living.”

“I’ve felt something like this pass through my spirit before,” Kamal told himself. “But when, how, and where? Oh, what a memory…it was love! The day she called out, ‘Kamal,’ that intoxicated you before you knew what intoxication was. Admit your long history with inebriation. You’ve been rowdy for ages, traveling passion’s drunken path, which is strewn with flowers and sweet herbs. That was before the transparent drops of dew were trampled into the mud. Alcohol’s the spirit of love once love’s inner lining of pain is stripped away. So love and grow intoxicated or get drunk and experience love.”

You’ll have a good time laughing at yourself later, but you’re a winner not a deserter. Suppose life is a tragedy; still, it’s a duty to play your role in it.”

He seemed to believe that truth would always be cruel. Should he adopt the avoidance of truth as his creed? He

truth was cruel, lies were ugly.

“The problem’s not that the truth is harsh but that liberation from ignorance is as painful as being born. Run after truth until you’re breathless. Accept the pain involved in re-creating yourself afresh. These ideas will take a life to comprehend, a hard one interspersed with drunken moments.”

Husbands are rational men, very rational, even when it goes against the grain. But a wife’s madness commences with her wedding day, because nothing less than devouring her husband will satisfy her. It seems to me that crazy people become lovers because they’re crazy. Lovers don’t go insane just because they’re in love. You’ll observe these lunatics talking about a woman as though she were an angel. A woman’s nothing more than a woman. She’s a tasty dish of which you quickly get your fill. Let those crazy lovers share a bed with her so they can see what she looks like when she wakes up or smell her sweat or other odors. After that are they going to talk about angels? A woman’s charm is a matter of cosmetics and other seductive devices. Once you fall into her trap, you see her for the human being she really is. The secret forces holding marriages together aren’t beauty or charm but children, the dowry’s balance demanded in exchange

for a divorce, and the support payments.”

“Man’s a filthy creature. Couldn’t he have been created better and cleaner?”

An angel with a heavy bottom wouldn’t be able to fly.

“I may be suffering, but still I’m alive….I’m a living human being. Anyone who deserves to be called a man will have to pay dearly in order to live.”

Amina’s desire for praise became more pronounced as she sensed increasingly that she did not deserve it.

“We rear our children, guide them, and advise them, but each child finds his way to a library, which is a world totally independent of us. There total strangers compete with us. So what can we do?”

Periodic revolutions were necessary to serve as a vaccine against this dread disease, for tyranny was the nation’s most deeply entrenched malady.

Considered in the abstract, marriage is a bitch of a deception, but it’s a powerful enough

force to make you cherish the deception as long as you live. Nations will be overthrown, and eras will pass away.

Without alcohol to distract one from humanity’s disdainful glare, reunions like this would be impossible. But life is full of prostitutes of various types. Some are cabinet ministers and others authors.

Lust is a tyrannical beauty readily felled by disgust.

We’re like an actor who, while conscious of the deceit implicit in his role onstage, worships his craft.”

“If I seem to laugh for no reason, I hope you’ll understand that some reasons are too important to be mentioned.”

“I don’t know, but try not to get angry. Many of the readers who find themselves in my stories become irate.” “Why?” “Perhaps because each of us has an idea he has created of himself. When a writer strips us of that self-image, we object angrily.” Kamal inquired anxiously, “Are you holding back some secret opinions about me?” His friend immediately reassured him: “Certainly not. But a writer may begin with someone he knows and then forget all of that person’s characteristics in creating a new specimen of humanity. The only relationship between the two may be that the first inspired the second. You seem to be an Easterner teetering uncertainly between East and West. He goes round and round until he’s dizzy.”