Hanif Kureishi

“Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They’ll sit on anyone’s knee.”

“O motorista fez uma curva fechada à esquerda, saiu da pista e entrou numa estradinha de terra, no meio de algumas árvores, parando em seguida. Ele nos jogou para fora do carro e ordenou que o seguíssemos. Obedecemos. Tínhamos uma arma apontada para nosso rosto. Não era a casa de papai, era o fim da linha. Aguardava-me uma morte súbita, violenta, matinal - no dia em que pisei na terra dos meus antepassados. Uma morte não de todo dessemelhante à que eu provocara, não fazia muito tempo. Seria justo, certo? Um carma honesto e quase instantâneo. Eu me perguntava se sairíamos nos jornais ingleses, se minha mãe forneceria fotos nossas.”

“Behind every vocation there is a fetish.”

“My guess is that she is uncomfortable in such an intransigent world but is unable to live accordingly to her own desire.”

“Now, watching her sleep, and closing his eyes, he felt, in this particular intimacy - stowed beneath her duvet - that he was intruding. At the same time, he knew, settling down, you couldn´t dislike anyone you'd seen sleep”

“Yet velvet curtains, soft cheese, compelling work and boys who can run full-tilt—it isn't enough. And if it isn't, it isn't. There's no living with that. The world is made from our imagination; our eyes enliven it, as our hands give it shape. Wanting makes it thrive; meaning is what you put in, not what you extract. You only see what you are inclined to see, and no more. We have to make the new.”

“Intreurig is deze avond, want ik ga weg en kom niet meer terug.”

“The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.”

“To be well married you have to a penchant for the intricacies of intimacy and larval change..If the personality is a spider's web, you will want to know every thread...Pleasures no longer come to you, but there are pickings to be had if you can learn to scavenge for them" ("The Body")”

“ Unlike films, plays don't take place in the past. The fear,anxiety of the actors is happening now, in front of you. If performing is risky, we identify with the possibility of granduer and disaster" ("The Body" and Seven Stories).”

“If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.”

“It was clear that Eleanor had been to bed with a large and random collection of people, but when I suggested she go to bed with me, she said, 'I don't think we should, just at the moment, do you?' As a man I found this pretty fucking insulting.”

“For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.”

“This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash.”

“Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.”

“قد علمتني الحياة أنه حين يراك الآخرون متحمساً، تفتر حماستهم هم، والعكس صحيح . لذا كلما ازدادت رغبتي بأمر ما، تصنّعت بروداً أعظم حياله .”

“Suddenly I shouted into the night air. 'Yes, yes, yes, it is true!"And now the world had some tension in it; now it twanged and vibrated with meaning and possibility! 'Yes, yes, fucking yes!”

“As a Newbody, however, I began to like the pornographic circus of rough sex; the stuff that resembled some of the modern dance I had seen, animalistic, without talk. I begged to be turned into meat, held down, tied, blindfolded, slapped, pulled and strangled, entirely merged in the physical, all my swirling selves sucked into orgasm.”

“How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.”

“Someone to whom jokes are never told soon contracts enthusiasm deficiency.”

“But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.”

“These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human.”

“Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted”

“No amount of promises can guarantee love”

“One would hope, as well that intimacy would leave more of a mark, that more of it would remain. But it doesn’t. You just end up thinking, who is this person?”

“In chili’s hand were his car keys, Ray-bans and Marlboros, without which he wouldn't leave his bathroom. Chili drank only black coffee and neat Jack Daniel’s; his suits were Boss, his underwear Calvin Klein, his actor Pacino. His barber shook his hand, his accountant took him to dinner, his drug dealer would come to him at all hours and accept his checks.”

“What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.”

“Almost certainly I will not tell her my intentions this evening or tonight. I will put it off. Why? Because words are actions and they make things happen. Once they are out you cannot put them back.”

“Apparently the town, a triumph of post-war socialist planning was a sewer, full of tattooed beasts and violent zombies, with vomit and blood frothing in the gutters. I couldn't wait to see it.”

“But you're beautiful, and the beautiful should be given whatever they want.""Hey, what about the ugly ones?""The ugly ones." She poked her tongue out. "It's their fault if their ugly. They're to be blamed, not pitied.”

“Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining love, was bloody work, and not a soft job.”

“Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind”

“So badly did he not want to fuck it up, he could only fuck it up.”

“If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I'd imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth.”

“I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me.”

“Like you, she will have been with other people, but I've got a feeling there's something between you.”

“Desire, like the dead or an unpleasant meal, would keep returning--it was ultimately indigestible.”

“The girl had many virtues: money, a car--a gold-coloured Capri, in which she played the latest funk--a big house and a rich father. When Valentin asked, 'What does your boyfriend do?' she replied, 'But I don't have one, really.”

“Love cannot be measured by its duration...”

“My pleasures disappeared with my vices. ”

“I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.”

“At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others. ”

“Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away. Why are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear?”

“Security and safety were the reward of dullness.”

“Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”

“The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.”

“...I love 'yes.' It's practically the most interesting word of all, don't you think?" Like a hinge opening a door outward. Yes, yes, yes.”

“Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live. … Why can’t they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?”

“Selbst die Verwandten der Berühmten [sind] berühmt, denn Ruhm [ist] erblich.”

“Die Belohnung für Langeweile sind Sicherheit und Geborgenheit.”