Distant Traveller Quotes

“You tell yourself: I’ll be gone To some other land, some other sea, To a city far lovelier than this Could ever have been or hoped to be - … You will find no new lands, no other seas. The”
― Attia Hosain, Distant Traveller: New and Selected Fiction

“You’ll understand one day how murderous, how suicidal, individual isolation is. You’ll cry then, suffocated by our culture’s cannibal loving.” He”
― Attia Hosain, Distant Traveller: New and Selected Fiction

“There were vast spaces in which his spirit could reach out, touching this, possessing that, of a million crowding sensations, but gradually at first, then rapidly, he had found himself reaching out to ever-receding mirages, alone in a void. He”
― Attia Hosain, Distant Traveller: New and Selected Fiction

“And writing in a foreign language, you come to realise how words create not only a single image but a series of images, so that if the image created in the mind of the writer is different from the image in the mind of the reader, there will not be complete understanding between them. My”
― Attia Hosain, Distant Traveller: New and Selected Fiction

“I grew up with the English language but not with the culture behind it. I was always outside that and deeply rooted in my own. I”
― Attia Hosain, Distant Traveller: New and Selected Fiction

“There is that sense of belonging one never has except in one’s own country. Anywhere else, no matter how long you stay, they never let you forget you are alien. Indeed, it is a good thing, because it is on foreign soil that you are made more conscious of your own roots and consequently become more knowledgable. And that is why, in my writings, I talk of my country, present my people to others.”
― Attia Hosain, Distant Traveller: New and Selected Fiction

“(Much later, reflecting on Iago’s dictum, “Put money in thy purse” she noted rather wryly, “I live on the capital of my mind”).”
― Attia Hosain, Distant Traveller: New and Selected Fiction

“In August 1947 on the cusp of Independence, my parents sat in the United Services Club in London with two friends, soldier comrades from the recent war. One of them – later to become a chief of the Indian army – raised his glass to the other – who became a general and diplomat in Pakistan. He said, “Let us drink to the aborted twins!” Attia records this with a sense of horror and disbelief.”
― Attia Hosain, Distant Traveller: New and Selected Fiction