Ghada

“As the present state of the planet indicates, we’re not fast learners, we human beings. Each generation must absorb the same lessons over and over again, groping its blind way through the realm of the Hungry Ghosts.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“My mouth was full and empty all at once. Empty because everything in it had no shape or sound or form. And full of everything that I felt then and feel now. That what I want to return to I cannot return to because the place and I have changed and what I have built here might be feeble and meek, but it took everything I had and I fear if I leave I will not have the will to return and then I will be lost again and I have been lost before and will do everything not to be that again and that I do not know if it is cowardly or courageous and I do not care and I have decided without deciding, because it is my only option, to keep to the days, to sleep when it is good for me to sleep and wake in good time to attend to my work and the people who depend on me. I wanted to tell her that I like being dependable. I like the fact that my colleagues rely on me and my students and their parents and my landlord. That I wish to be better to Hannah, that out of everyone I know here there is no one else that I would rather depend on or have depend on me and that I hope one day she will meet her and know what I mean. That, although all these people would be fine without me, I am held together by their demands and that I am very sorry not to be beside her, to be the son I had always imagined I would be and desired to be. And that my train can only continue or else I fear I will fall off a cliff. And I wanted to tell her that flying, being divorced from the earth, was like being separated from her and, now that I am on land, I never ever want to be unearthed again and that I am ashamed of it and was ashamed of it for a long time, but I am no longer. And that I know Father is growing old and needs me and Souad now has three children for whom I have been an absent uncle, and I have not given my father an heir and I know how important that is to him and that it all left me with the conviction that no one should ever leave their home. That no matter what happens to you when you are at home happens to you at home. My friends never stopped wanting a different life, I wanted to tell her. But I have managed, Mother, not to want a different life most of the time and that is some achievement.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“Given all she has suffered, the God they told her was all she needed could not hold her faith intact. For any young person, if the deity she hears about is not manifested in the actions of the people who make up her world, the God-word turns into hypocrisy. If she does retain an image of God, it’s likely to be the vindictive moralizer who judges her mercilessly or the impotent sky phantom I rejected as a child.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Only love and art can do this: only inside a book or in front of a painting can one truly be let into another's perspective. It has always struck me as a paradox how in the solitary arts there is something intimately communal.”
― Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena