Home > Author > Hanif Kureishi
61 " Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions. "
― Hanif Kureishi , Collected Stories
62 " What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed. "
― Hanif Kureishi , Intimacy
63 " No amount of promises can guarantee love "
― Hanif Kureishi , Love in a Blue Time
64 " ...I love 'yes.' It's practically the most interesting word of all, don't you think?" Like a hinge opening a door outward. Yes, yes, yes. "
― Hanif Kureishi , The Black Album
65 " Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted "
66 " The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising. "
― Hanif Kureishi , The Word and the Bomb
67 " And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language "
― Hanif Kureishi , Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories
68 " So badly did he not want to fuck it up, he could only fuck it up. "
― Hanif Kureishi , Something to Tell You
69 " One would hope, as well that intimacy would leave more of a mark, that more of it would remain. But it doesn’t. You just end up thinking, who is this person? "
70 " My pleasures disappeared with my vices. "
71 " But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President. "
72 " These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human. "
73 " Almost certainly I will not tell her my intentions this evening or tonight. I will put it off. Why? Because words are actions and they make things happen. Once they are out you cannot put them back. "
74 " Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind "
75 " For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died. "
― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia
76 " Like you, she will have been with other people, but I've got a feeling there's something between you. "
77 " And so I sat in the centre of this old city that I loved, which itself sat at the bottom of a tiny island. I was surrounded by people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn't always be this way. "
78 " Desire, like the dead or an unpleasant meal, would keep returning--it was ultimately indigestible. "
79 " People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know. "
80 " قد علمتني الحياة أنه حين يراك الآخرون متحمساً، تفتر حماستهم هم، والعكس صحيح . لذا كلما ازدادت رغبتي بأمر ما، تصنّعت بروداً أعظم حياله . "