126 Quotes by Hisham Matar

For an overwhelming majority of my life, my country has been a source of pain, fear, and embarrassment.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I first began to think about what profession I should go into. It was 1978. I was seven and had just been handed over by the women of my family to the earnest and self-important gatherings of the men. I was no longer the responsibility of my aunts and older female cousins. I was now a man. This was a tragedy.

I am longing to see Libya rejoin the world as the internationalist Mediterranean country that it was.

We need a father to rage against.

Being my father's son is a kind of privilege.

Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.

Gaddafi's ability to have survived so long rests on his convenient position in not being committed to a single ideology and his use of violence in such a theatrical way.

To be okay with not knowing is a sign of a mature person and a mature society.

I used to believe that it was not possible to lose someone I loved without sensing it somehow, without feeling something shift. But it's not true. People can die, sometimes the closest people to us, without us noticing a thing.