36 Quotes by Kamel Daoud

She taught me to read the book in a certain way, tilting it sideways as though to make invisible details fall out.

As for me, I don’t like anything that rises to heaven, I only like things affected by gravity.

When I saw her arriving in the bus from Algiers, it was like a hole in my heart. Her presence alone wouldn’t be enough to ease my longing.

Incandescence, desire, dreaminess, expectation, the madness of the senses. That’s what French books of days gone by refer to as le tourment, “the pangs.” I can’t describe the forces that take hold of your body when you fall in love, which in my vocabulary is a hazy and imprecise word, a myopic millipede crawling up the back of something huge.

Mother, death, love -- everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination.

Feelings grow old slowly, not as fast as skin. Maybe someone who dies at the age of a hundred doesn’t feel anything more than the fear that grips us when we’re six and it’s nighttime and our mother comes in to turn out the light.

When you kill someone, there’s a part of you that immediately starts devising an explanation, making up an alibi, putting together a version of the facts that washes your hands clean, even though they still smell of gunpowder and sweat.

Committing a real murder gives one some new, clear-cut certitudes. Read what your hero wrote about his stay in a prison cell. I often reread that passage myself, it’s the most interesting part of his whole hodgepodge of sun and salt. When your hero’s in his cell, that’s when he’s best at asking the big questions.

For once, I have a chance to talk about this story … Picture an old whore dazed by an excess of men; she and this story of mine share some features. It’s like a text written on parchment and scattered all over the world; it’s brittle, patched up, no longer recognizable, infinitely rehashed — and yet look at you, sitting beside me and hoping for something new, something never heard before.