Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Living in hope is a really terrible thing. "

Related Quotes:

" I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist. "

" From my family alone, Qaddafi had imprisoned five men. "

" My best hope is that Libya turns into a peaceful, sensible country that has all the things my father and lots of others have been calling for: independence of the courts and press, a protected and democratic constitution, with different parties involved in a healthy and open debate. "

" I lost my father when I was 19, so the majority of my life has been under this cloud, and I have been full of the intention to find out what happened. "

" One of the frustrations of prison life, which is also one of its intended consequences, is that the prisoner is made ineffective. He is unable to be of much use. The aim is to render him powerless. "

" I've never thought of myself in terms of an identity. I'm always baffled when I encounter someone who gives the impression about being confident about a particular defined identity. "

" Great writing fills me with hopeful enthusiasm and never envy. "

" I sometimes wonder if I would have become a writer if what happened to my father hadn't happened. "

" I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do. "

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

" Turgenev's achievement lies in how he succeeded, in spite of himself, his country, and his time, in exempting his work from public duty. This has given it that unnameable quality that makes every sentence true, every silence trustworthy. "

" The Qaddafis, father and sons, speak the grammar of dictatorship: threats and bribery. "

" Architecture remains a passion and a subject I'm very interested in. I learned a great deal from studying it and working in it. "

" When you've been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope. "

" There are two voices: the first says write; the second hardly speaks, but I know what he wants. And if I let him, nothing would get done. He hovers at the edges. "

" All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self. "

" In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home. "

" Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination. "

" Over the centuries, close-knit tribes have played an important part in the cohesion of Libyan society. "

" My work is my shelter, particularly in these moments when things are happening fast. "

" Growing up in the Libya of the 1970s, I remember the prevalence of local bands who were as much influenced by Arabic musical traditions as by the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. But the project of 'Arabisation' soon got to them, too, and western musical instruments were declared forbidden as 'instruments of imperialism.' "

" Nothing we read can import new or foreign feelings that we don't, in one form or another, already possess. "

" In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out. "

" The laws of the lowly gangster govern Qaddafi and his sons. "

" I've very aware of my rootlessness. "

" A revolution is not a painless march to the gates of freedom and justice. It is a struggle between rage and hope, between the temptation to destroy and the desire to build. "

" 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. "

" It is easy to underestimate the demands of an open heart. "

" I don't believe people are interested in dates and facts. I don't think it is interesting to say what it is to be this person or that, but I do believe it is entertaining and perhaps even of value to express how it is to be that person. "

" 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. "