The Return Quotes

“What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future. Even if I had held his hand, and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense. I suspect many men who have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“Had the pain not been so precise
I would have asked
To which of my sorrows should I yield.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“I heard the stories and registered them perhaps the way we all, from within our detailed lives, perceive facts--that is, we do not perceive them at all until they have been repeated countless times and, even then, understand them only partially. So much information is lost that every small loss provokes inexplicable grief. Power must know this. Power must know how fatigued human nature is, and how unready we are to listen, and how willing we are to settle for lies. Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“how to live away from places and people I love. Joseph Brodsky was right. So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured. But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right: never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow. What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“She said, ‘Aren’t you frightened for your daughter?’ I told her, ‘It is exactly because I am afraid for my daughter’s future that I am going out.’ ”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“It's not your job to read their hearts,' he once told me after I claimed, with shameful certainty, that begging was a profession. 'Your duty is not to doubt but to give.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“And I suppose that is what we want from our mothers: to maintain the world and, even if it is a lie, to proceed as though the world could be maintained. Whereas my father was obsessed with the past and the future, with returning to and remaking Libya, my mother was devoted to the present. For this reason, she was the truly radical force in my adolescence.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“Those who would later lament Seif and his father's (Qaddafi) regime are like a man who looks at the ashes and says, "I much prefer the fire”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a son’s gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows. With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful—for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget—that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“I had always regarded Manhattan the way an orphan might think of the mother who had laid him on the doorstep of a mosque: it meant nothing to me but also everything.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“He had given me something priceless: namely, his confidence. I am grateful I was forced to make my own way. His disappearance did put me in need and make my future uncertain, but it turns out need and uncertainty can be excellent teachers.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“Encountering our dialect during those years was always disconcerting, provoking in me, and with equal force, both fear and longing.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“Part of what we fear in suffering—perhaps the part we fear most—is transformation”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“In other words, one in every six inhabitants of the Libyan capital was kidnapped and made to disappear. The damage was more lasting because the Italian authorities selected the most noted and distinguished men: scholars, jurists, wealthy traders, and bureaucrats.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“Nothing ever happens here. But when it does, it happens at the speed of lightning. You can change the world in a day. It might take forty-two years for that day to come, but when it does…”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“The simple rule was never to refuse any one or thing in need. “It’s not your job to read their hearts,” he once told me after I claimed, with shameful certainty, that begging was a profession. “Your duty is not to doubt but to give. And don’t ask questions at the door. Allow them only to tell you what they came for after they’ve had tea and something to eat.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“They are men, like all men, who have come into the world through another man, a sponsor, opening the gate and, if they are lucky, doing so gently, perhaps with a reassuring smile and an encouraging nudge on the shoulder. And the fathers must have known, having once themselves been sons, that the ghostly presence of their hand will remain throughout the years, to the end of time, and that no matter what burdens are laid on that shoulder or the number of kisses a lover plants there, perhaps knowingly driven by the secret wish to erase the claim of another, the shoulder will remain forever faithful, remembering that good man’s hand that had ushered them into the world. To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a son’s gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows. With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful—for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget—that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“There is a moment when you realise that you and your parent are not the same person, and it usually occurs when you are both consumed by a similar passion.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“So much happens in this world without us blinking.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“The past, like a severed limb, tried to fix itself onto the body of the present.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“Had the pain not been so precise I would have asked To which of my sorrows should I yield.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“I watched them from my window. They came with bulldozers and dug up the graves, one after the other. They burnt the corpses, and now everyone is afraid to touch them.” Then he said, “But, thanks be to God, my son is here.” “He’s safe?” I asked. “Yes. He’s in his room. The air conditioner has been on the whole time.” Then after a pause he added, “But it’s been three days now. I am doing my best but he’s beginning to smell. I must find a way to bury him soon.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“He had seen the banning of books, music and films, the closure of theaters and cinemas, the outlawing of football, and all the other countless ways in which the Libyan dictatorship, like a crazed jealous lover, infiltrated every aspect of public and private life.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“History remembers Mussolini as the buffoonish Fascist, the ineffective silly man of Italy who led a lame military campaign in the Second World War, but in Libya he oversaw a campaign of genocide. The”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that 'knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“It represented, in moments of desperation, the possibility of finally cheating myself out of exile.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“O è questo l'essere a casa: casa come luogo dal quale l'intero mondo tutt'a un tratto è accessibile?”
― Hisham Matar, The Return

“Grief is not a whodunit story, or a puzzle to solve, but an active and vibrant enterprise. It is hard, honest work. It can break your back. It is part of one’s initiation into death and—I don’t know why, I have no way of justifying it—it is a hopeful part at that.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between