36 Quotes by Kamel Daoud

Ha, ha! What are you drinking? In these parts, you get offered the best liquors after your death, not before. And that’s religion, my brother. Drink up — in a few years, after the end of the world, the only bar still open will be in Paradise.

What hurts me every time I think about it is that he killed him by passing over him, not by shooting him. You know, his crime is majestically nonchalant.

Lying on my back in the courtyard, I made an even denser night for myself by closing my eyes. When I opened them, I remember seeing yet more stars in the sky, and I knew I was trapped in a bigger dream, a more gigantic denial, that of another being who always kept his eyes closed and didn’t want to see anything, like me.

Everybody wants a village wife and a big-city whore.

Yes, quite a blue sky, it looks like a child’s coloring book. Or an answered prayer.

I’m so old that I often tell myself, on nights when multitudes of stars are sparkling in the sky, there must necessarily be something to be discovered from living so long. Living, what an effort! At the end, there must necessarily be, there has to be, some sort of essential revelation. It shocks me, this disproportion between my insignificance and the vastness of the cosmos. I often think there must be something all the same, something in the middle between my triviality and the universe!

That cemetery was the place where I awakened to life, believe me. It was where I became aware that I had a right to the fire of my presence in the world — yes, I had a right to it! — despite the absurdity of my condition, which consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly.

At this hour, it seems that people are entitled to something more than their routine.

There’s always another, my friend. In love, in friendship, or even on a train, there he is, the other, sitting across from you and staring at you, or turning his back to you and deepening the perspectives of your solitude.