Gravel Heart Quotes

“What is the point of literature? I think that the person who asks that question will not find my answer convincing anyway”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“This is the burden we all have to bear, to live a useful life,”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“You have to talk about the things that cause you pain.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“The whole world ends up in London somehow,”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“Don’t fear the dark places in your mind, otherwise rage will blacken your sight.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“But yes, you can imagine, you must try. Nothing stands between us and atrocities but words, so there is no choice but to try and imagine.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“No,’ I said, ‘nothing like that. Just a lot of bits and pieces to sort out, bits of life.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“That was how people like you and I came to know of so much of the world, reading about it from people who despised us.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“Where I come from no one would dream of saying that anything to do with them was the best in the world. How could one know that without knowing the whole world? Here they have plenty which is the best in the world - the best goalkeeper in the world, the best university in the world, the best hospital in the world, the best newspaper in the world. You had to take that in with your mother’s milk to say such words without cringing.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“It was not something I learnt, this way of being with her, it was not something I heard people talking about. Something of her slipped into my body and fitted there so snugly that I knew it would never leave or diminish.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“What is the point of literature? I think that the person who asks that question will not find my answer convincing anyway.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“My mother’s father, Ahmed Musa Ibrahim, was an educated man, a travelled man, who had no time for these self-deluding patrician airs. He preferred to speak about justice and liberty and the right to self-fulfilment.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“and marked their ceremonial imperial rituals with white linen uniforms adorned with fantasy medals and wore cork helmets festooned with feathers and carried swords in gilt-edged scabbards, like conquerors. They gave themselves tin-god titles and pretended that they were aristocrats.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“Evin sessizliği beni boğuyordu ve bana onu hatırlatan çok fazla eşya vardı.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“Her şey karmaşıktır ve sorular yalnızca yakınlık ve deneyim ile anlaşılabilecek şeyleri basitleştirir.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“Göndermediğim mektupları defterde tuttum, böylece defter yalnızlık ve keyifsizlik anlarımın toplandığı bir yere dönüştü.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“Duyulmuş ezgiler güzeldir, duyulmamışları daha güzeldir.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“Kimse bana dünyanın çirkin yüzünü görmeyi ögretmemişti ve ben her şeyi aptal gibi görüyor, hiçbir şeyi anlamıyordum.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“Bazı kitaplardan hiç ayrılmadım çünkü beni hiç sıkmadılar.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“Aşkın başlangıcı şükretmektir. Sonrası maşukun kapasitesine, yani faziletine bağlıdır." (Doğruluk Kitabı)”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“Bir yaşa gelmeden hayatın ne kadar uzun olduğunu anlamıyorsun. Her şeyinin bittiğiniz sanıyorsun ama bitmiyor, uzun süre bitmiyor. bedeninin hayatta kalmak için ne kadar az güce ihtiyacı olduğunu anlamıyorsun, vücudun sana inat ölmeyi reddediyor.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“If the posters and the campaigns and demonstrations were a guide, any injustice in the world seemed to be theirs to claim, accompanied by frivolities that were like a celebration of disorder. They were fortunate people who desired to own even the suffering of others.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“and what might be intended as simple curiosity may feel like a demand for a confession.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“I was fourteen years old then and a person can feel old and wise at that age even when he really had no idea, and what he took for wisdom was only a precocious intuition arrived at without humility, just a little shit working things out for himself.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“The tarbush may have been abolished as backward in Atatürk’s Turkish Republic, and it may have been on its way out in other places in the 1950s (Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia) where it was becoming an emblem of corrupt bashas and beys and the defeated armies of Arab nationalism, but the news had not yet reached my mother’s father, at least not when the photograph was taken. To him it was still a sign of sophisticated Islamic modernity, secular and practical in place of the medieval turban.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“My mother’s father, Ahmed Musa Ibrahim, was an educated man, a travelled man, who had no time for these self-deluding patrician airs. He preferred to speak about justice and liberty and the right to self-fulfilment. He would pay for these words in due course. He had spent two years at Makerere College in Uganda and one year at Edinburgh University in Scotland, completing a Diploma in Public Health.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“memory of her grief,”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“All the children of the powerful were being groomed to be powerful”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart