Top 50 Hisham Matar Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “There and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.”

— Hisham Matar

2. “What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?”

— Hisham Matar

3. “Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.”

— Hisham Matar

4. “My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future. Even if I had held his hand, and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense. I suspect many men who have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.”

— Hisham Matar

5. “When I first began writing In the Country of Men all I had was the voice of the protagonist. He intrigued me and my desire to want to know him and his world became almost compulsive.”

— Hisham Matar

6. “And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”

— Hisham Matar

7. “Books written out of fire give me a great deal of pleasure. You get the sense that the world for these writers could not have continued if the book hadn’t been written. When you come across a book like that it is a privilege.”

— Hisham Matar

8. “And I suppose that is what we want from our mothers: to maintain the world and, even if it is a lie, to proceed as though the world could be maintained. Whereas my father was obsessed with the past and the future, with returning to and remaking Libya, my mother was devoted to the present. For this reason, she was the truly radical force in my adolescence.”

— Hisham Matar

9. “Perhaps the world is fair and balanced after all; no one gains and no one loses or no one gains and everyone loses equally.”

— Hisham Matar

10. “There is a moment when you realise that you and your parent are not the same person, and it usually occurs when you are both consumed by a similar passion.”

— Hisham Matar

11. “It represented, in moments of desperation, the possibility of finally cheating myself out of exile.”

— Hisham Matar

12. “It is sometimes hard to escape the belief that history exists against the artist.”

— Hisham Matar

13. “I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.”

— Hisham Matar

14. “I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write.”

— Hisham Matar

15. “Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.”

— Hisham Matar

16. “So old and persistent did Mother’s unhappiness seem that I had never stopped to ask its true cause. Nothing is more acceptable than that which we are born into.”

— Hisham Matar

17. “History remembers Mussolini as the buffoonish Fascist, the ineffective silly man of Italy who led a lame military campaign in the Second World War, but in Libya he oversaw a campaign of genocide. The.”

— Hisham Matar

18. “It’s one thing not to fear death, another to sing under its sword.”

— Hisham Matar

19. “I wanted everything good in the world for him; every dream he had, all of his secret plans, to come true. I suddenly was glad that Mona was his.”

— Hisham Matar

20. “He had given me something priceless: namely, his confidence. I am grateful I was forced to make my own way. His disappearance did put me in need and make my future uncertain, but it turns out need and uncertainty can be excellent teachers.”

— Hisham Matar

21. “At that time I would read passages of Father’s books or a newspaper article that I was certain he had read because I wanted to follow a trail he had taken.”

— Hisham Matar

22. “If we were all engaged in some conversation, she would direct most of her contributions towards me, as if I were the front wall of a squash court.”

— Hisham Matar

23. “There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.”

— Hisham Matar

24. “It’s not your job to read their hearts,′ he once told me after I claimed, with shameful certainty, that begging was a profession. ‘Your duty is not to doubt but to give.”

— Hisham Matar

25. “Naoma, and to the rest of the world she was Um.”

— Hisham Matar

26. “The world had to be sliced into hours to fill; otherwise you could go mad with loneliness.”

— Hisham Matar

27. “The three things that help writing the most are living, writing, and reading. In that order.”

— Hisham Matar

28. “Encountering our dialect during those years was always disconcerting, provoking in me, and with equal force, both fear and longing.”

— Hisham Matar

29. “Suddenly he is beside me. I do not know how, but we are the same age. There is something tragic about this fact.”

— Hisham Matar

30. “The past, like a severed limb, tried to fix itself onto the body of the present.”

— Hisham Matar

31. “The simple rule was never to refuse any one or thing in need. “It’s not your job to read their hearts,” he once told me after I claimed, with shameful certainty, that begging was a profession. “Your duty is not to doubt but to give. And don’t ask questions at the door. Allow them only to tell you what they came for after they’ve had tea and something to eat.”

— Hisham Matar

32. “Doesn’t it make you shudder to think that the heart of the universe is so cold?”

— Hisham Matar

33. “There are moments, moments like this, when an abstract longing overcomes me, one made all the more violent by its lack of fixed purpose. The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and, although nothing does, we continue inside that dream. And, as in a dream, the shape of my days bear no relation to what I had, somehow and without knowing it, allowed myself to expect.”

— Hisham Matar

34. “Independence, which I had up to then held in very high regard, indeed revered it, was now to me a curse, the devil himself. It is dependence that a sane mind should seek; to depend on others and be in turn dependable.”

— Hisham Matar

35. “I had always regarded Manhattan the way an orphan might think of the mother who had laid him on the doorstep of a mosque: it meant nothing to me but also everything.”

— Hisham Matar

36. “And violence demands translation.”

— Hisham Matar

37. “The truest opinions are never uttered.”

— Hisham Matar

38. “But to have an endless number of books sit on the shelf just because one has read them or might one day read them is absurd. Besides, is there anything more depressing than a wall of books? But you, my dear, disagree. Like Montaigne, you believe that the very presence of books in your room cultivates you, that books are not only to be read but to be lived with.”

— Hisham Matar

39. “He had seen the banning of books, music and films, the closure of theaters and cinemas, the outlawing of football, and all the other countless ways in which the Libyan dictatorship, like a crazed jealous lover, infiltrated every aspect of public and private life.”

— Hisham Matar

40. “And yet the morning washes everything away. Even the relentless sound of bullets dies out momentarily, and I think, where would humanity be without morning? Even the most violent need is calmed by dawn, and you can almost catch the fresh scent of hope.”

— Hisham Matar

41. “She was older and all the more beautiful, had the weary tiredness of one who, in surrendering to her life, was ennobled by it.”

— Hisham Matar

42. “In other words, one in every six inhabitants of the Libyan capital was kidnapped and made to disappear. The damage was more lasting because the Italian authorities selected the most noted and distinguished men: scholars, jurists, wealthy traders, and bureaucrats.”

— Hisham Matar

43. “Part of what we fear in suffering – perhaps the part we fear most – is transformation.”

— Hisham Matar

44. “I remember thinking, this must be what it is like to be in love. Love as a place of rest.”

— Hisham Matar

45. “For a writer, exile is prison, a severing from the source, and so, courageous or not, he dies in front of our eyes.”

— Hisham Matar

46. “To be from countries such as ours... is to continually feel obliged to explain them.”

— Hisham Matar

47. “This, I now know, is what is meant by grief, a word that sounds like something stolen, picked out of your pocket when you least expect it. It takes a long time to learn the meaning of a word, particularly a word like that, or perhaps all words, even ones as simple as “you” or “me.”

— Hisham Matar

48. “And let the others think what they will. After all, what does it matter what people think? All that matters is one’s sanity.”

— Hisham Matar

49. “My friends never stopped wanting a different life, I wanted to tell her. But I have managed, Mother, not to want a different life most of the time and that is some achievement.”

— Hisham Matar

50. “I must keep moving. To live is to act.”

— Hisham Matar