“You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you;”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“As a matter of fact, that's the reason why I've learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish his sentences for him. The murderer got famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language. The murderer's words and expressions are my unclaimed goods. Besides, the country's littered with words that don't belong to anyone anymore.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use. This God — I like traveling in his direction, on foot if necessary, but I don’t want to take an organized trip.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“Nobody’s granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“...the devil's hour, two o'clock on a summer afternoon--the siesta hour.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“don’t fast, I will never go on any pilgrimage, and I drink wine — and what’s more, the air that makes it better. To cry out that I’m free, and that God is a question, not an answer, and that I want to meet him alone, at my death as at my birth.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“M’ma avait l’art de rendre vivants les fantômes et, inversement, d’anéantir ses proches,”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“Now there were a few skirt-wearing, firm-breasted Algerian women who shuttled between our world and the world of the roumis, down in the French neighborhoods. We brats used to call them whores and stone them with our eyes. They were fascinating targets, because they could promise the pleasures of”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“La vie dans les campagnes était dure, révélant ce que les villes cachaient, à savoir que ce pays crevait de faim.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“And afterward, therefore, everybody bent over backward to prove there was no murder, just sunstroke.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“To tell the truth, love is a heavenly beast that scares the hell out of me. I watch it devour people, two by two; it fascinates them with the lure of eternity, shuts them up in a sort of cocoon, lifts them up to heaven, and then drops their carcasses back to earth like peels.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“So Musa was a simple god, a god of few words. His thick beard and strong arms made him seem like a giant who could have wrung the neck of any soldier in any ancient pharaoh's army. Which explains why, on the day when we learned of his death and the circumstances surrounding it, I didn't feel sad or angry at first; instead I felt disappointed and offended, as if someone had insulted me. My brother Musa was capable of parting the sea, and yet he died in insignificance, like a common bit player, on a beach that today has disappeared, close to the waves that should have made him famous forever.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“But Musa’s body will remain a mystery. There’s not a word in the book about it. That’s denial of a shockingly violent kind, don’t you think? As soon as the shot is fired, the murderer turns around, heading for a mystery he considers worthier of interest than the Arab’s life.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“But there’s something irreparable as well: The crime forever compromises both love and the possibility of loving. I killed a man, and since then, life is no longer sacred in my eyes.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“Why is it forbidden down here and promised up there? Drunken driving. Maybe God doesn’t want humanity to drink while it’s driving the universe to its place, holding on to the steering wheel of heaven”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“I didn't want to kill time. I don't like that expression. I like to look at time, follow it with my eyes, take what I can.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“In my head, every voice corresponds with a woman, a time of life, a concern, a mood, or even the kind of wash that's going to be hung out that day.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“I know this from the hollow sound that persists after the men’s prayer, and from their faces pressed against the window of supplication. And from their coloring, the complexion of people who respond to fear of the absurd with zeal. As for me, I don’t like anything that rises to heaven, I only like things affected by gravity. I’ll go so far as to say I abhor religions. All of them! Because they falsify the weight of the world. Sometimes I feel like busting through the wall that separates me from my neighbor, grabbing him by the throat, and yelling at him to quit reciting his sniveling prayers, accept the world, open his eyes to his own strength, his own dignity, and stop running after a father who has absconded to heaven and is never coming back. Have a look at that group passing by, over there. Notice the little girl with the veil on her head, even though she’s not old enough to know what a body is, or what desire is. What can you do with such people? Eh?”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“She lied not from a desire to deceive but in order to correct reality and mitigate the absurdity that struck her world and mine.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“Technically, the killing itself is due either to the sun or to pure idleness.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“Je me suis toujours demandé : pourquoi ce rapport compliqué avec le vin ? Pourquoi diabolise-t-on ce breuvage quand il est censé couler à profusion au paradis ? Pourquoi est-il interdit ici-bas, et promis là-haut ? Conduite en état d’ivresse. Peut-être Dieu ne veut-il pas que l’humanité boive pendant qu’elle conduit l’univers à sa place et tient le volant des cieux…”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“I think I’d just like justice to be done. That may seem ridiculous at my age … But I swear it’s true. I don’t mean the justice of the courts, I mean the justice that comes when the scales are balanced”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“How do people who love each other do it? How can they stand it? What is it that makes them forget they were born alone and will die separate?”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“I’ll tell you this up front: The other dead man, the murder victim, was my brother. There’s nothing left of him. There’s only me, left to speak in his place, sitting in this bar, waiting for condolences no one’s ever going to offer.”
― Kamel Daoud, quote from The Meursault Investigation
“Following a private conversation with Harry, Minerva McGonagall later took the controversial decision to add a portrait of Severus Snape to the gallery of old headmasters and headmistresses in her tower office.”
― J.K. Rowling, quote from Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a growing confusion about how these things really behaved ---- waves or particles, particles or waves? Everything looked like both.
This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 or 1926 with the advent of the correct equations for quantum mechanics. Now we know how the electrons and light behave. But what can I call it? If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before. Your experience with things that you have seen before is incomplete. The behavior of things on a very tiny scale is simply different. An atom does not behave like a weight hanging on a spring and oscillating. Nor does it behave like a miniature representation of the solar system with little planets going around in orbits. Nor does it appear to be somewhat like a cloud or fog of some sort surrounding the nucleus. It behaves like nothing you have seen before.
There is one simplication at least. Electrons behave in this respect in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly in the same way….
The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. I will not describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar; I will simply describe it. There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from The Character of Physical Law
“I wonder how it takes you, that moment when everything turns to shadows.”
― Juliet Marillier, quote from Wolfskin
“I believe you would square off at Satan if he came around and inconvenienced you!”
― Elizabeth Peters, quote from Crocodile on the Sandbank
“It is often advantageous to forget. Forget your wincing humiliations, forget life's blows, and get on. For blocks in every direction, down every street in the city, people not yet old enough to have lines on their foreheads were laughing away memory, warmly ensconced in shrines of forgetfulness. Those who followed the word of God and those who preferred what the priests called "hoodoo" alike. People everywhere forgetting with drink or forgetting with religion or forgetting with the numbing quality of their many heaps of things. They looked forward and imagined rosy tomorrows, and gave up whatever horrors heckled their dreams, and listened to the pretty stories of whomever ruled their pulpit.”
― Anna Godbersen, quote from Bright Young Things
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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