“It was only a phrase that went from mouth to mouth and was never quite swallowed.”
― Ismail Kadare, quote from Broken April
“And everything would be different, different.”
― Ismail Kadare, quote from Broken April
“To tell the truth, this was one of the few cases in which she had not told him just what she was thinking. Usually, she let him know whatever thoughts happened to come to her, and indeed he never took it amiss if she let slip a word that might pain him, because when all was said and done that was the price one paid for sincerity.”
― Ismail Kadare, quote from Broken April
“His suspicion that he was not going in the right direction tortmented him more and more. At last he had the conviction that he would never go anywhere but in the wrong direction, to the very end of the handful of days that was left to him, unhappy moonstruck pilgrim, whose April was to be cut off short.”
― Ismail Kadare, quote from Broken April
“An Albanian’s house is the dwelling of God and the guest.’ Of God and the guest, you see. So before it is the house of its master, it is the house of one’s guest. The guest, in an Albanian’s life, represents the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations. One may pardon the man who spills the blood of one’s father or of one’s son, but never the blood of a guest.”
― Ismail Kadare, quote from Broken April
“Having left, for various reasons, the homeland of epic, they were uprooted like trees overthrown, they had lost their heroic character and deep-seated virtue.”
― Ismail Kadare, quote from Broken April
“A mountaineer’s house, before being his home and the home of his family, is the home of God and of guests.”
― Ismail Kadare, quote from Broken April
“Two or three times it occurred to Gjorg that all these men had killed, and that each had his story. But those stories were locked deep within them. It was not just chance that in the glow of the fire their mouths, and even more their jaws, looked as if they had the shape of certain antique locks.”
― Ismail Kadare, quote from Broken April
“Why the Albanians had created the institution of the guest, exalting it above all other human relations, even those of kinship. “Perhaps the answer lies in the democratic character of this institution,” he said, setting himself to think his way through the matter. “Any ordinary man, on any day, can be raised to the lofty station of a guest. The path to that temporary deification is open to anybody at any time.[...] Given that anyone at all can grasp the sceptre of the guest,” he went on, “and since that sceptre, for every Albanian, surpasses even the king’s sceptre, may we not assume that in the Albanian’s life of danger and want, that to be a guest if only for four hours or twenty-four hours, is a kind of respite, a moment of oblivion, a truce, a reprieve, and—why not?—an escape from everyday life into some divine reality?”
― Ismail Kadare, quote from Broken April
Ismail Kadare
Born place: in Gjirokastër, Albania
Born date January 28, 1936
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“Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?”
― Emily Brontë, quote from The Complete Poems of Emily Bronte [with Biographical Introduction]
“As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from The Quest for Cosmic Justice
“A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but it's lowest ones”
― Nelson Mandela, quote from Long Walk to Freedom: Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
“The pain bursts through Etta like caffeine,”
― Emma Hooper, quote from Etta and Otto and Russell and James
“I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe is some sense must have known that we were coming”
― Freeman Dyson, quote from Disturbing the Universe
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