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Ahdaf Soueif
23 quotes
“I now find myself looking at every sentence, every image, that purports to tell the West about the Arabs and the Muslims with this question in mind: to what extent does it feed into existing stereotypes and established prejudice?”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from “It Matters” (2003) collected in Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground
“— and there, on the table under her bedroom window, lies the voice that has set her dreaming again. Fragments of a life lived a long, long time ago. Across a hundred years the woman’s voice speaks to her — so clearly that she cannot believe it is not possible to pick up her pen and answer. (first lines)”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Put football instead of cricket and she could have been me. She could have been Arwa, or Deena or any of the girls I grew up with here in Cairo in the Sixties. What difference do a hundred years — or a continent — make?”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We always know how the story ends. What we don't know is what happens along the way.”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So. Tell me. What do you think? Which is better? To take action and perhaps make a fatal mistake - or to take no action and die slowly anyway?”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too?”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I think, because we use the same words, we assume we mean the same thing”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There have been those among us who have been so dazzled by the might and technological wizardy of Europe that they have been rather a man who stands lost in admiration at the gun that is raised to shoot him.”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can it strike so suddenly? Without warning, without preparation? Should it not grow on you, taking its time, so that when the moment comes when you think 'I love', you know or at least you imagine you know what it is you love? How can it be that a set of the shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the world better than it does the white waves that whip it , caress it , collapse on to it . The white foam knows nothing better than those sands which wait for it , rise to it and suck it in .but what do the waves know of the massed, hot, still sands of the desert just twenty , no , ten feet beyond the scalloped edge ? And what does the beach knows of depths, the cold, the currents just there, where-do you see it? - Where the water turns a deeper blue. (from “Sandpiper”)”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think of you often. I think of you often, and I remember. (beginning of "I Think of You")”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She had been wrong to think it wouldn't matter that much to him, yes, he took her for granted, of course he did , but he took her for granted - not like an old coat in the corner of a dark cupboard, as she'd put it to herself, but like the very air that he breathed.”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How wonderful to simply do things instead of wondering if they are worth doing or discussing whether to do them or being told not to do them or listening to somebody else describe doing them.”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was too cold to dream (“1964”)”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I remember a time of happy, dappled sunlight. (first line of "Knowing")”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had watched them carefully over the years. Sometimes they argued. But less and less as time went by. Aisha learnt to be careful. To avoid certain subjects. To avoid enthusiasms, excesses, tears. To avoid - me. It was not that she was afraid of him. I believe she was afraid for him; afraid of me. And she wanted to go on loving him. (beginning of "The Nativity")”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe not a hydra because that’s really, really nasty. I think there was almost a false head: we ripped open the packaging and now we’re faced with the real thing that’s there in the box…”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the state of Egypt after the ousting of Mubarak in “INTERVIEW WITH AHDAF SOUEIF” in The White Review (March 2012)
“…A work of fiction lives by empathy – the extending of my self into another's, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else's shoes. This itself is a political act: empathy is at the heart of much revolutionary action…”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how fiction should be empathetic in “Ahdaf Soueif: In times of crisis, fiction has to take a back seat” in The Guardian (2012 Aug 17)
“…In Egypt, in the decade of slow, simmering discontent before the revolution, novelists produced texts of critique, of dystopia, of nightmare. Now, we all seem to have given up – for the moment – on fiction.”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On political upheaval is affecting fictional works in “Ahdaf Soueif: In times of crisis, fiction has to take a back seat” in The Guardian (2012 Aug 17)
“…Most people are content to live their lives within prescribed and personal boundaries. But one of the points of artists surely is that they live outside their skin. That they're connected. That they hurt with the hurt of their fellow humans. How, then, can they disengage? How can you – if your task, if your gift, is narrative – absent yourself from the great narrative of the world?...”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the question of what an artist is responsible for in “Ahdaf Soueif: In times of crisis, fiction has to take a back seat” in The Guardian (2012 Aug 17)
“It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved — turned this way and that, examined, considered. And so they sit, and touch, and talk, and breathe, and so they string their moments into a glorious chain, and throw it round each other's necks, garland each other with it. Invisible to all others, it shines for them, a beacon across a crowded room, across an ocean, across time.”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It can't be that bad. Surely it can't be that bad. There must be a way, only we can't see it yet. A way of making a space for ourselves where we can make the best of ourselves - we just can't quite see it yet. But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you're running - panting to catch up. How can you think clearly when you're running? That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you - unchanged. You can turn back the pages, look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part.”
Ahdaf Soueif (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source