126 Quotes by Hisham Matar

One's nature is like a mountain

Can you become a man without becoming your father?

What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.

Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.

There and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.

Those who would later lament Seif and his father's (Qaddafi) regime are like a man who looks at the ashes and says, "I much prefer the fire

I wanted this world to still. I wanted to fix it and be fixed within it. But everything was on the move, the clouds, the wind...

There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy