185 Quotes by Hanif Kureishi

But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.

This ghost of a mother had begun to ask him questions about who he was and who he truly loved. Was he capable of love?

One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else’s childhood.

At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others.

He had some impression that happiness was beyond him and everything was coming down, and that life could not be grasped but only lived.

He would enjoy women more, she had informed him, if he understood their clothes.

At detumescence, after all, there is conversation, that is where love begins.

We are surviving, in this pleasant liberal enclave where people read and speak freely, on borrowed time. But for those not inside – the dispossessed of the world, the poor, the refugees and those forced into exile – existence is wasteland.

I can’t quite count the ways in which we hurt one another. It was the means by which we tried to help one another – me, turning her into a patient, her, turning me into a dull authority – which were as bad as, if not worse, than our actual abuses.