“He had worked out long ago that police officers evaluated a citizen on thebasis of three factors—his appearance, his occupation, and the way hespoke; according to this assessment, a citizen in a police station wouldeither be treated with respect or despised and beaten.”

“Education, medical treatment, and work are the natural rights of every citizen in the world.”

“Ilived through beautiful times, Busayna. It was a different age. Cairowas like Europe. It was clean and smart and the people were wellmannered and respectable and everyone knew his place exactly. I wasdifferent too. I had my station in life, my money, all my friends were ofa certain niveau, I had my special places where I would spend theevening—the Automobile Club, the Club Muhammad Ali, the GeziraClub. What times! Every night was filled with laughter and parties anddrinking and singing. There were lots of foreigners in Cairo. Most ofthe people living downtown were foreigners, until Abd el Nasser threwthem out in 1956.”“Why did he throw them out?”“He threw the Jews out first, then the rest of the foreigners gotscared and left. By the way, what’s your opinion of Abd el Nasser?”“I was born after he died. I don’t know. Some people say he was ahero and others say he was a criminal.”“Abd el Nasser was the worst ruler in the whole history of Egypt.He ruined the country and brought us defeat and poverty. The damagehe did to the Egyptian character will take years to repair. Abd el Nassertaught the Egyptians to be cowards, opportunists, and hypocrites.”“So why do people love him?”“Who says people love him?”“Lots of people that I know love him.”“Anyone who loves Abd el Nasser is either an ignoramus or didwell out of him. The Free Officers were a bunch of kids from the dregsof society, destitutes and sons of destitutes. Nahhas Basha was a goodman and he cared about the poor. He allowed them to join the MilitaryCollege and the result was that they made the coup of 1952. They ruledEgypt and they robbed it and looted it and made millions. Of coursethey have to love Abd el Nasser; he was the boss of their gang.”

“Oh God, how did he get to be sixty? How quickly the years had passed! His whole life had passed before he realized it, before he began. He hadn’t lived. What had he done in his life? What had he achieved? Could he measure his happy times? How much? How many? Several days, a few months at best? It was not fair to advance in years without realizing the value of time, not fair that no one drew our attention to the time that was slipping through our fingers by the moment. It was a clever trick: to realize the value of life only just before it ended.”

“It became clear to her that all men, however respectable in appearance and however elevated their position in society, were utter weaklings in front of a beautiful woman. - The Yacoubian Building, p. 42”

“Sheikh Bilal had takenhim aside the day before the wedding and spoken to him of marriageand his wife’s rights in the Law, stressing to him that there was nothingfor a Muslim to feel shy about in marrying a woman who was not avirgin and that a Muslim woman’s previous marriage ought not to be aweak point that her new husband could exploit against her. He saidsarcastically, “The secularists accuse us of puritanism and rigidity,even while they suffer from innumerable neuroses. You’ll find that ifone of them marries a woman who was previously married, thethought of her first husband will haunt him and he may treat herbadly, as though punishing her for her legitimate marriage. Islam hasno such complexes.”

“The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.”