The Return by Hisham Matar

  • (108) [On Milanese visitors imagining the potential for Africa] "Turning Africa into a bordello [brothel] and offering her up to our young men, so that they may vent the entire spectrum of their human, heroic, sadistic, and aesthetic emotions."

  • "Feeling that odd sensation one feels when the changes in us are juxtaposed against the constancy of a familiar geography."

  • "That childhood conviction that the Libyan Sea was an open door...a precise and uncomplicated conviction that the world was available to me."

  • (145) "The body of my father is gone, but his place is here and occupied by something that cannot just be called memory. It is alive and current."

    • "How could the complexities of being, the mechanics of our anatomy, the intelligence of our biology, and the endless firmament of our interiority -- the thoughts and questions and yearnings and hopes and hunger and desire and the thousand and one contradictions that inhabit us at any given moment -- ever have an ending that could be marked by a date on a calendar?"

    • "Hasn't it always seemed that way? Haven't I always detected the confusion of funerals, the uncertainty of cemeteries, the bewilderment of a headstone?"

    • [On Grief]

      • "It is part of one's initiation into death and -- I don't know why, I have no way of justifying it -- it is a hopeful part at that."

    • "The natural alignment of the heart remains toward the light….I have never understood this. Not intellectually anyway.But it is somehow in the body, in the physical knowledge of the eternity of each moment, in the expansive nature of time and space, that declarative statements such as 'He is dead' are not precise."

      • "My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present, and future."

  • (154) [On prison guard asking his father about who smuggled and delivered the letter] "Your father said to the guard: 'I will tell you. I wrote that letter with my own hand, I folded the piece of paper several times, and I gave it to you. If anyone asks me, I will tell them you delivered it.' "

    • "When one of us young prisoners was being taken to the interrogation room, your father would call out 'Boys, if you get stuck, say Jaballa Matar told you to do it.' I loved him for that, because you have no idea what hearing that did for my heart. Strength at the weakest hour."

  • (158) [On incompleteThe Execution of Maximilian] "It would be hard to think of a painting that better evokes the inconclusive fate of my father and the men who died in Abu Salim."