My Friends

My ideal man," Malak said ponderingly. "I'm not sure what that means. I don't want the ideal. I want complexity. I want passion. I want imperfection. "My ideal man is not ideal. But," she said, leaning forward, "I'll tell you about him." "I want him to have lunch at home. I want him to help me with my own mind. I want him to be bookish, wise, cunning, and exemplary. I want him to be a good storyteller, and always on my side." "Yes, I want him to be near me. A good conversationalist, proud, not afraid of the lofty heights." "I want him to be a singer, one who knows and loves a good song, can play an instrument, the oud or the ney, and preferably both. I want him to be a good mourner, know how to attend to the pain of others, a consoler who could assuage the grief I have for all those I loved and befriended and who are no longer here. I want him to be a healer, an expert in all that troubles me. I want him to be a fire that annihilates all danger that lies ahead and behind me and that which I have, somehow, without his help, found a way to avoid. I want him to be faithful---" "Incapable of deception. I want him to be constant__" "Constant in his love and in his prayers and, when those prayers are not answered, I want him to change reality with his own hands. I want him to be my lord-" "For all the world to see. I want him to make me proud, to make vanish old and fresh longings, new and unremembered regrets. I want him to be vigilant-" "To protect me from sorrows even once their great heights have passed. I want him to know how to deal with the past. I want him to be occasionally gripped by fear-" "The fear of losing me. I want him to be patient, to help me to endure the injustices visited upon the houses of those I love. But I also want him to be impatient-" "To lose all reason and hurry off, forgetting his shoes and hat, and ride-" "His horse flanked by wings of angry dust, galloping, if need be, all night to find the traitorous, to change my fortunes and avenge me." "And then I want him to return to me, to prosper by my side. I want to take him to the clearest stream, one only I know the way to, and there quench his thirst. I want him to look at me sometimes as if he does not know who I am. But I want to be forever recognized by him, come what may, to point me out in a crowd when, after the passage, we are reunited." "I want him to see me when I cannot see myself.

This, I now know, is what is meant by grief, a word that sounds like something stolen, picked out of your pocket when you least expect it. It takes a long time to learn the meaning of a word, particularly a word like that, or perhaps all words, even ones as simple as “you” or “me.

There are moments, moments like this, when an abstract longing overcomes me, one made all the more violent by its lack of fixed purpose. The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and, although nothing does, we continue inside that dream. And, as in a dream, the shape of my days bear no relation to what I had, somehow and without knowing it, allowed myself to expect.

... we ask of writers what we ask of our closest friends: to help us mediate and interpret the world.

I must keep moving. To live is to act.

The truest opinions are never uttered.

She was older and all the more beautiful, had the weary tiredness of one who, in surrendering to her life, was ennobled by it.

God veil our faults," as the old folks say. A simple, much overused prayer. But what little wisdom it contains. A philosophy of sorts. I love how modest it is. I mean, they could have said, "God erase our faults," Now that would've been ambitious. But "veil" is better. It presupposes that to live a life is to have faults, that no one is perfect and certainly no one is innocent. Not even you and I.

My friends never stopped wanting a different life, I wanted to tell her. But I have managed, Mother, not to want a different life most of the time and that is some achievement.

To be from countries such as ours... is to continually feel obliged to explain them.

A thousand and one things could befall us and the people we love the most would have no hint of it.

I remember thinking, this must be what it is like to be in love. Love as a place of rest.

And yet the morning washes everything away. Even the relentless sound of bullets dies out momentarily, and I think, where would humanity be without morning? Even the most violent need is calmed by dawn, and you can almost catch the fresh scent of hope.

Doesn’t it make you shudder to think that the heart of the universe is so cold?

At first I thought, to be a parent you have to be an idealist. Then I learnt that to be a parent is to be continually coming up against everything that is not ideal about you.

why would God want to reward absolute obedience, regardless of the consequences, when He had bestowed on us reason, granting us not only the ability but the responsibility to arrive at our own decisions?

AS foolish to think we are free of history, as it would be of gravity.

To live a life is not, as I have sometime thought, to be condemned to witness the slow death of things. Or it's not that alone, but, chiefly and above all else, certainly above country and religion and our various affiliations, life is for the living.

But to have an endless number of books sit on the shelf just because one has read them or might one day read them is absurd. Besides, is there anything more depressing than a wall of books? But you, my dear, disagree. Like Montaigne, you believe that the very presence of books in your room cultivates you, that books are not only to be read but to be lived with.

Independence, which I had up to then held in very high regard, indeed revered it, was now to me a curse, the devil himself. It is dependence that a sane mind should seek; to depend on others and be in turn dependable.

This was not true, but the lie seemed to happen ahead of me, without my full consent. This too was to become a habit. It is far too tempting, when you are away from home, to make stuff up.

For a writer, exile is prison, a severing from the source, and so, courageous or not, he dies in front of our eyes.

As I listened to him, courage scaled the walls and smuggled itself in.

And let the others think what they will. After all, what does it matter what people think? All that matters is one’s sanity

A mercy, I remember thinking, that we are made to tire at the end of each day.

My father answered. His voice was astonishingly beautiful. I remember being surprised by it, by how broad and hospitable it was, the shade of a well-rooted tree.

The oddity of revenge is that it leaves you defeated.

My faith in literature too returned. Books, particularly great novels, never before seemed more practical to the business of living.

One evening in Paris, Hosam told me that he believed that the most important human dramas take place not on battlefields but in the quiet hours.