Home > Author > Abdulrazak Gurnah
1 " Respect yourself and others will come to respect you. That is true about all of us, but especially true about women. That is the meaning of honour. "
― Abdulrazak Gurnah , Paradise
2 " Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses. "
― Abdulrazak Gurnah , By the Sea
3 " I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. "
4 " That's the way life takes us,' Elleke once said. 'It takes us like this, then it turns us over and takes us like that.' What she didn't say was that through it all we manage to cling to something that makes sense. "
5 " That’s the way life takes us,’ Elleke once said. ‘It takes us like this, then it turns us over and takes us like that.’ What she didn’t say was that through it all we manage to cling to something that makes sense.-- By The Sea "
― Abdulrazak Gurnah
6 " We were strolling along the waterfront, his favourite walk, going nowhere in particular, the postcolonial condition. "
― Abdulrazak Gurnah , Admiring Silence
7 " 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
8 " In their books I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering, they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves. I read about the diseases that tormented us, about the future that lay before us, about the world we lived in and our place in it. It was as if they had remade us, and in ways that we no longer had any recourse but to accept, so complete and well-fitting was the story they told about us. I don’t suppose the story was told cynically, because I think they believed it too. "
9 " This is the burden we all have to bear, to live a useful life, "
10 " The whole world ends up in London somehow, "
11 " Life’s like that, clinging futilely to the very objects that imprison us. "
12 " They wanted to glory in grievance, in promises of vengeance, in their past oppression, in their present poverty and in the nobility of their darker skins. "
13 " I'm not perfect. I'm unfulfilled. "
14 " I am a refugee, an asylum-seeker. These are not simple words, even if habit of hearing them makes them seem so. "
15 " No,’ I said, ‘nothing like that. Just a lot of bits and pieces to sort out, bits of life. "
16 " And at school there was little or no time for those other stories, just an orderly accumulation of the real knowledge they brought to us, in books they made available to us, in a language they taught us. "
17 " Me ofrecieron la libertad como un regalo. Ella. ¿Quién le dijo que era su dueña para dármela? Sé de qué libertad estás hablando. Yo tuve esa libertad en el momento de nacer. Cuando esa gente dice me perteneces, yo soy tu dueño, es como el paso de la lluvia o la puesta del sol. Al día siguiente, el sol saldrá de nuevo les guste o no. Lo mismo pasa con la libertad. Pueden encerrarte, ponerte cadenas, denigrar todos tus pequeños anhelos, pero la libertad no es algo que puedan arrebatarte. Cuando han terminado contigo, todavía están tan lejos de poseerte como lo estaban el día en que naciste. ¿Me comprendes? Éste es el trabajo que me ha sido encomendado, ¿qué puede ofrecerme esa de ahí que sea más libre que esto? "
18 " departures. "
19 " I was only rarely called upon to say anything in the open battlefield, although at times Emma looked accusingly at me and made me feel that I might have offered more support had I been of a less spineless constitution "
20 " I thought you’d come back to get married,’ he said with a grin. ‘Not to carry out an archaeological project.’ ‘Cut out that getting married stuff,’ I said, and in this way we smilingly slid past the troublesome moment. "
