## New highlights added March 10, 2024 at 6:04 PM - “We are in a tide,” he had said back in the passionate days of the Arab Spring, when he was trying to convince me to return to Benghazi with him, “in it and of it. As foolish to think we are free of history as it would be of gravity.” - Tags: [[blue]] - Or perhaps he did see me and the blankness in his eyes is the blankness we all carry deep within us toward those we love. - I became, in silent and private ways, powerfully aware of the fragility of all that I treasured: my family, my very sense of myself, the future I allowed myself to expect. - You pity us poor creatures,” Mustafa told him after we had all come to know each other a little, “afflicted by that rare condition that compels an individual to go to a bookshelf, pick up a book, and read it from start to finish for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of it.” - I tried to teach him not to judge too quickly, that some books, like some people, are shy.” - concerned characters who were unmoored and who, like the man eaten by the cat, were at once innocent and implicated in their fate. - The genius of rumors is that they can coexist with the truth, so that it became possible - A mercy, I remember thinking, that we are made to tire at the end of each day. - And when the morning came, I was undone again, I was cloven in the middle, coming apart. I was not a man but a set of components that each day needed to be reassembled. - I began to see novels and poetry—indeed, the entire human event—not as a field of demarcations, made up of languages and periods and styles and schools and civilizations, but rather as a great river with its own internal ancestry - could sit without saying a word, enduring that discreet anonymity of Libyan male society, with its careful social architecture that allows each one to keep to himself all that matters - perhaps one needed to know something very well before being able to be ambivalent about it - It’s another thing to have to deal with other people’s fears. - “It’s not true what some say, that dying, when it comes, brings with it its own acceptance. The opposite, if you ask me. It brings rebellion. Because you realize then that you’ve spent every day of your life learning how to live. That you don’t know how to do anything else. - The line that now separates me from my former self is the chasm that I remain unable to bridge. You cannot be two people at once. - One evening in Paris, Hosam told me that he believed that the most important human dramas take place not on battlefields but in the quiet hours - I like the idea,” he said, when he first confessed this to me, “of a new book read without its future owner ever knowing it. A secret just between me and the pages - where an exile chooses to live is inevitably arbitrary. - “Life is a traitor,” - “It’s narcissism,” he said, his tone hardening, “to hide one’s intentions behind theories of the inevitable.” - this, like other questions, is what drops of water are to earth. Repeated enough times, a path eventually opens. - Tags: [[blue]] - It’s impossible to bridge the gap. Our country is too distant in the past for our British experience to be of any use here. We are shadows. Here and there. Shadows. Unless we go back. I mean really go back. - No man should seek to see his family objectively,” she said. “Not only because of the sheer impossibility of the task, but because such an ambition alone breaks the covenant between kin. The whole point, silly child, is to love unfathomably. - to be a parent is to be continually coming up against everything that is not ideal about you.” - Tags: [[blue]]