The Last Summer of Reason Quotes

“The arrogant elimination of the Djaouts of our world must nerve us to pursue our own combative doctrine, namely: that peaceful cohabitation on this planet demands that while the upholders of any creed are free to adopt their own existential absolutes, the right of others to do the same is thereby rendered implicit and sacrosanct. Thus the creed of inquiry, of knowledge and exchange of ideas, must be upheld as an absolute, as ancient and eternal as any other.”
― Wole Soyinka, The Last Summer of Reason

“The sweet sadness bequeathed by every day that leaves us behind has not yet been chased out of this country. But the course of time has gone crazy, and who dares swear to the appearance of the following day.
Will there be another spring?”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“That is perhaps the only way for him to set his grief free, to let it go away, be dissolved so that he himself can find some meaning in what surrounds him, in what continues to supplement him, in what life remains to him.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“How can those who want to fight meet when mistrust has been raised to the level of neurosis? You are afraid to reveal yourself to your neighbor, but also to your friend, your brother, and your offspring. Everyone is barricaded behind a bulwark of hypocrisy and artificial piety. When you are not sure of the reliability of the terrain, silence is the best complement to this armor. For the least little crack that shows, the least bit of a lowered defense can prove fatal. And the massive club of the Regulators of the Faith will then come and crush you like an ordinary dung fly who has the gall to settle on a cake.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“Millionaires of every kind have discovered religious fervor. Among the believing masses and at a small price, they have acquired a respectability that erases all their activities and launders their money.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“The country has entered an era in which questions are not asked, for questions are daughters of disquiet or arrogance, both fruits of temptation and the food of sacrilege.”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason

“As long as music can transport the spirit, painting can make the core bloom with a rapture of colors, and poetry can make the heart pound with rebellion and hope, they will have gained nothing. To affirm their victory, they knew what they had to do. They broke musical instruments, burned rolls of film, slashed the canvases of paintings, reduced sculptures to rubble, and they were permeated with the exalted feeling that they were thereby pursuing and completing the purifying and grandiose work of their ancestors battling anthropomorphism”
― Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason