Yasmina Khadra Quotes

Basically, being alive means keeping yourself ready for the sky to fall in on you at any time. If you start from the assumption that existence is only an ordeal, a test we have to pass, then you’re equipped to deal with its sorrows and its surprises. If you persist in expecting it to give you something it can’t give, that just proves that you haven’t understood anything. Take things as they come; don’t turn them into a drama. You’re not piloting the ship, you’re following the course of your destiny.

Life is a train that stops at no stations; you either jump abroad or stand on the platform and watch as it passes.

I was depressed. I knew I was lost, but I had no idea how to find myself again. It was as though I was a different person, an infuriating, disappointing yet indispensable person whose body was my only home.

We’ve already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we’ve forgotten it.

Culture is always about politics in the end.

If you want your life to be a small part of eternity, to be lucid even in the heart of madness, love… Love with all your strength, love as though it is all you know how to do, love enough to make the gods themselves jealous… for it is in love that all ugliness reveals its beauty.

For a man to think he can fulfil his destiny without a woman is a misunderstanding, a miscalculation; it is reckless and folly. Certainly a woman is not everthing, but everything depends on her.

You’re all the world to me. Whenever i can’t see you… I die a little.

Posterity has never made the grave’s embrace less cruel. It simply assuages our fear of death, because there is no better cure for out inevitable morality then the illusion of a beautiful eternity. But there is one illusion I still hold dear: that is the thought of an enlightened nation. That is the only future I still dream of.

Of course, I’m aware of the animosities destroying brain cells on both sides, and I know all about the obstinacy of the warring parties, their refusal to reach an agreement, their devotion to their own murderous hatred.

It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here, from the land of the Pashtuns, where desertification proceeds at a steady, implacable crawl even in the consciences and intellects of men.

Though there are things beyond our understanding, for the most part we are the architects of our own unhappiness.