Memory of Departure Quotes

“There was so much that was not being said.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure

“Nairobi’s the best in Africa, you’ll see. Only you need to be a millionaire to enjoy it. And there are too many Indians.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure

“I tell you, this Africa. We’re savages”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure

“As the years passed, we bore with rising desperation the betrayal of the promise of freedom.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure

“It is strange now to think that we could all live like that, absorbed with our resentments and hates.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure

“There is no God,’ I said, getting cocky.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure

“Nobody had told Imam Musa, but at twelve I also started some serious masturbating. God punished me for every stroke of my hand. In the end I gave up God and stopped listening to lying old scholars who could emphasise a point with one tensely outstretched forefinger while the other searched for a little boy’s anus. I started to play football instead.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure

“My mother was married to my father when she was sixteen. Her father was a lorry driver who also owned a shop in a small village near Jinja in Uganda. My father was in his twenties at the time and was known to be a troublemaker. My grandmother thought that a woman would cure him of his interest in anuses.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure

“I could only feel terror and loathing for the world they had brought me into.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure

“He hectored me about respect and obedience, when never in my life had I sought to challenge or thwart him. I lived in terror of him. Sometimes I cried as soon as I was in his presence. His cruelties were inflicted with such passion.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure

“girls sitting together and apart from us, reared into self-conscious anxiety in the presence of men”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure