Ahdaf Soueif Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

Tell me, if you thought a man had a tendresse for you, but he wasn't doing anything about it. And you wanted to hurry him up a little so you made a move, an unmistakable move; one that nobody could pretend had been a misunderstanding. And he - he ignored it - ignored you. What would you feel?

Ahdaf Soueif
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
But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you are running -panting- to catch up.

Ahdaf Soueif
I haven't come to you only to take, I haven't come to you empty handed : I bring you poetry as great as yours but in anther tongue, I bring you black eyes and golden skin and curly hair, I bring you Islam and Luxor and Alexandria and Lutes and tambourines and date-palms and silk rugs and sunshine and incense and voluptuous ways

Ahdaf Soueif
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
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.

Ahdaf Soueif
If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too?

Ahdaf Soueif
So at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow; the closer you are to the heart, the closer to the reversal. Nowhere to go but down. You reach the core and then you're blown away--

Ahdaf Soueif
From 1949 to the present, for every dollar the US spent on an African, it spent $250.65 on an Israeli, and for every dollar it spent on someone from the Western Hemisphere outside the US, it spent $214 on an Israeli.

Ahdaf Soueif