If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English Quotes

“What if female arousal is just the belief that you will not die at this mans hands?”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“Question: If the beast is already in your house, does that make the wilderness safer?”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“Question: If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story?”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“I return to English as if to the arms of a lover and feel instantly safe and indigenous there. What are borders, anyway? Just lines in the sand. What are citizens? Just people fucking within the same lines in the sand - and their children and then their children”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“I’m caught between my desire to understand and my desire to appear as though I already understand.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“Men love to save me. Men love to save me from other men.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“To wake up from a dream you have been dreaming since birth is powerful. But to wake up from a dream you have been dreaming from birth with almost a hundred million people, brothers and strangers alike, a collective nightmare, a nightmare we had been imbibing all our lives and passing around to one another, feeding innocently to our newborns—that we are worthless, that we deserve no better than the filth we live in . . . If there is a Judgment Day, this was it.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“If you have documented a revolution, how can you bring yourself to capture anything else on those same streets where your brothers stained the asphalt with their lives?”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“I was surprised that someone like him could have such eclectic tastes, that he could be historically inclined and access a larger world through the cracked screen of his outdated phone. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d cobbled together this collection just for me, to prove he could.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“Question: How much vanity does it take to be a healer? Answer: An astronomical amount.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“That hour we spent together beneath the heavened striations was kinder to me than ten years in Cairo had been—kinder, more merciful, as though I were a living creature after all, deserving of a gentle touch.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“More than anything, what binds people here to one another here is the pointless struggle for quality of life. I’m learning slowly that having money and the option to leave frays any claim I have to this place. It turns out that to be clean in Egypt is just to be free of Egypt, to exercise the choice to stay or go elsewhere, which most of the population cannot do. The boy from Shobrakheit will die never having crossed a border.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“Clean being code for more than just money; a coveted un-Egyptianness, a combination of first world contact and old-world etiquette.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“Now, twenty years later, I realize I have never been loved by a man the way my father once loved me. The boy from Shobrakheit hot-wires an intimacy just by sounding like him. He wishes me not a good morning, but a childlike morning or a morning of flowers. He texts, I hope your day will be like the birds. I hope your night will be like the childhood of trees. Don’t be sad, my moon. I have a remembering of the lives I didn’t live.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“I just don’t want you to be frightened, he continued, and it was clear to any American girl that he wanted me to be frightened. I just don’t want you to be upset. I’d never let anyone upset you. I’d never let a woman that I—any woman that I know be humiliated like that, he said, and he was watching me earnestly in the elevator mirror, hoping I would be humiliated like that.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“Will my greed or, worse, my need—face-slapping, hair-tearing desperation—bubble to the surface and expose the charade we have been acting out”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“Still, I was surprised because he’s otherwise so romantically naive. Maybe all Egyptians are. Reem is the same. They think dating is about love, when any New Yorker will tell you that dating is a martial art”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“That’s how he talked about the rest of the world— “outside,” as though this country were a broom closet, as though I were a fish-eye peephole.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“That we need to be needed by the one we love is something I should have learned years ago from watching my parents.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“There is a difference between being poor and being cheap, and William is cheap, with delusions of sophistication.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“It’s not his fault. He doesn’t speak English. It’s not his fault he has no work. There is no work to be had; all night long the downtown sidewalks and doorways are haunted by whip-thin men who abuse pharmaceuticals, make animal sounds at passing women.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“In 2011, we really believed we were birthing a new order, that everything would change and the corruption that had seeped through the veins of the nation, poisoning every organ, would be flushed out at last . . . Six years later, it’s embarrassing to remember just how innocent we were—not naive so much as innocent.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“He was searching for the Egyptian in me, or possibly the illness.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“I'd never seen such restlessness. Even his quiet voice was quickly quiet the way flies and roaches are.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“For every Egyptian of my generation, this will be the greatest political event of their lives, the drama they return to and repeat to their children and to their children's children to explain the world they are born into. I missed it entirely. Watched the revolution on television from the comfort of my home on the Upper West Side, a French bulldog on my lap. How convenient, then, when all is said and done, to arrive in the reckless aftermath, claiming, Me too, I am one of you. I'm too late returning and he knows it. As long as we are outside, on the streets in this city that he owns, he leverages his knowledge against me.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“If your lover lives in a building grand enough to have a servants' staircase, how long before she sends you down it?”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“But even so. The boy can't boil water or heat bread on the eye of the stove. Leaves the milk out of the fridge. Tries to cut an apple in the night and I wake up to blood spattered on the kitchen floor, seeds everywhere. There is all the evidence of a past tended by a woman's hands.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“he had given up gluten and diary and daughters.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“I’m caught between my desire to understand and my desire to appear as though I already understand”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“To wake up from a dream you have been dreaming since birth is powerful. But to wake up from a dream you have been dreaming from birth with almost a hundred million people, brothers and strangers alike, a collective nightmare, a nightmare we had been imbibing all our lives and passing around to one another, feeding innocently to our newborns—that we are worthless, that we deserve no better than the filth we live in …”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English