At some point in the night she had a dream. Or it was possible that she was partially awake, and was only remembering a dream? She was alone among the rocks on a dark coast...

Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. it was often on trpis that he thought most clearly,...

Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a state of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the...

…before there can be change there must be discontent.

Since the world began has any man ever been able to know what would happen tomorrow? The world of men is today. I’m asking you to open your heart today. Tomorrow belongs to Allah …

Cannabis sativa and its derivatives are strictly prohibited in Turkey, and the natural correlative of this proscription is that alcohol, far from being frowned upon as it is in other Moslem lands, is freely drunk;...

Although I knew enough Freud to believe that the sex urge was an important mainspring of life, it still seemed to me that any conscious manifestation of sex was necessarily ludicrous. Defecation and copulation were...

…he refused to consider the Moroccans’ present culture, however decadent, an established fact, an existing thing. Instead, he seemed to believe that it was something accidentally left over from bygone centuries, now in a necessary...

And now you know it’s not like that. Right? It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tasted wonderful, and you don’t even think of its ever being used up. Then you...

The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her.

There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam.

the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind . . . [from] nothing, I suppose. Just...

That was one of the troubles with the Istiqlal, with all politics: you talked about people as though they were not really people, as though they were only things, numbers, animals, perhaps, but not really...

He awoke, opened his eye. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his...

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we’re just so small.

…Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he...

Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.

Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another...

If you could not have freedom you could still have vengeance.

Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded.

The soul is the weariest part of the body.

Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night

…It is far more sinful to pray irregularly than not to pray at all.

May Allah bless you.” Or had she said: “May Allah burn you?” He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike.

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from...

If people are living the same as always, with their bellies full of food, they’ll just go on the same way. If they get hungry and unhappy enough, something happens.