Admiring Silence Quotes

“We were strolling along the waterfront, his favourite walk, going nowhere in particular, the postcolonial condition.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“They wanted to glory in grievance, in promises of vengeance, in their past oppression, in their present poverty and in the nobility of their darker skins.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“I'm not perfect. I'm unfulfilled.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“But I am so afraid of disturbing this fragile silence.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“Life’s like that, clinging futilely to the very objects that imprison us.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“I have found myself leaning heavily on this pain. At first I tried to silence it, thinking it would go and leave me to my agitated content. That it would linger for a season, a firm reminder of the disquiet that lurks and coils below the surface of the stubbornly self-gratifying vision of our lives. Far from going, it became more clear, more precisely located, concrete, an object that occupied space within me, cockroachy, dark and intimate, emitting thick, stinking fumes that reeked of loneliness and terror. When I woke up in the morning, I groped for it, then sighed with plunging recognition as I felt it stirring inside me, alive and well.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“In no time at all after I moved, I was overcome by the enormity of my abandonment, like someone weeping in a crowd.

I was astonished by the sudden surge of loneliness and terror I felt when I realized how stranded I was in this hostile place, that I did not know how to speak to people and win them over to me,that the bank, the canteen, the supermarket, the dark streets seemed so intimidating, and that I could not return from where I came – that, as I then thought, I had lost everything. Then Emma came and filled my life. I can’t describe that.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“I like stubborn, wily survivors, and wish I could be one myself. So the next day I walked to his office, to extend my appreciation of his doggedness and to wish him a joyful time of it.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“departures.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“I was only rarely called upon to say anything in the open battlefield, although at times Emma looked accusingly at me and made me feel that I might have offered more support had I been of a less spineless constitution”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“Hayat böyledir, tam da bizi hapseden nesnelere faydasız bir şekilde sarılırız.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“Umudu kırılmış insana başka kim hayatın hatırasını geri verebilir ki, söyle?”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“Bu anlamsız dünya kargaşa dolu ve ben de kaybolanlardan biriyim.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“Su ölüye hediyedir. Ölünün ruhu hayata susamışlıkla kavrulur ve anıların suyundan içmeyi arzular ama yalnızca unutulmanın suyundan içebilir.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“I don’t think I ever got over those early days, though. Even after all these years I can’t get over the feeling of being alien in England, of being a foreigner. Sometimes I think that what I feel for England is disappointed love.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“I knew then (not that I didn’t really know before, but some lessons have to be learned and relearned, and even then we forget them so easily and talk ourselves into something ameliorating and hopeful) that the food-stores were going to remain empty, and that schools would be without books, and the air would be filled with cruel, duplicitous promises, that justice would be just another word brayed from the mouths of the donkeys who rule us, and of course the toilets were going to remain blocked for a long time.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“As if they were anything more than debilitating stories that turned everything into moments of reprise that disabled and disarmed.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“People like Uncle Hashim can say things like that, even if they are true. They can store them for years, hold on to them and let them harden and solidify, until the moment arrives when they can be delivered as they had been intended to, to crush a bone or bruise the heart.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“I could not help it. I began to sob. For the father I had never known, and for his desperate escapade which had filled everyone else with pain. But mainly I sobbed for myself, for the shambles I had made of my life, for what I had already lost and for what I feared I was still to lose.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“they lodge themselves in the infinite corners of recall, and then return in their full regalia in ones and twos and threes, each little bunch stepping forward to corrode the heart with venom again and again.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“Yet I lay in bed that night imagining what it would be like not to feel such an alien in England, to be able to live with someone to whom I could speak casually about things without having to give long explanations, what it would be like not to live in England at all, but here, in a crowd, rather than always being and feeling on the edges of everything.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“I thought you’d come back to get married,’ he said with a grin. ‘Not to carry out an archaeological project.’ ‘Cut out that getting married stuff,’ I said, and in this way we smilingly slid past the troublesome moment.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“That is what stories can do, they can push the feeble disorders we live with out of sight.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“So I smiled and began to talk in what I hoped was a genial and friendly voice, but as soon as I started I could hear resonances of my teacher tones: informative, seeking to persuade, holding things back. I pressed on. I was a teacher, that was what I was. I was unfulfilled.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence