La plus secrète mémoire des hommes Quotes

“Devenir adulte est toujours une infidélité qu’on fait à nos tendres années. Mais là réside toute la beauté de l’enfance : elle existe pour être trahie, et cette trahison est la naissance de la nostalgie, le seul sentiment qui permette, un jour peut-être, à l’extrémité de la vie, de retrouver la pureté de jeunesse.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes

“D'un écrivain et de son oeuvre, on peut au moins savoir ceci : l'un et l'autre marchent ensemble dans le labyrinthe le plus parfait qu'on puisse imaginer, une longue route circulaire, où leur destination se confond avec leur origine : la solitude”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes

“Nunca intentes decir de qué habla un gran libro. O si lo haces, la única respuesta posible es: de nada.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes

“Ik weet dat Madag me op een nacht zal komen opzoeken om me rekenschap te vragen of misschien om zich te wreken. En wanneer zijn fantoom op me afstapt, zal het de verschrikkelijke existentiële keuze formuleren die het dilemma van zijn leven was; de keuze waarover eenieder die van de literatuur bezeten is in zijn hart steeds zal aarzelen: schrijven, niet schrijven.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes

“Perhaps what we’re all looking for, my dear Diary, is never truth as revelation, but rather truth as possibility, the gleam at the bottom of the mine in which we’ve been endlessly digging without a headlamp.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“steer”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“chance is simply a fate unknown to us, a fate written in invisible ink.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“become learned men in the culture that subjugated and abused their own.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“life, its unpredictable current, its uncertainties, its circumstances that, at times, destroy the values and principles we believed (claimed) to be immutable.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“O acaso é apenas um destino que desconhecemos, um destino escrito em tinta invisível.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes

“Maybe it's chance. Maybe it's fate. But the two aren't necessarily contradictory. Chance is merely a fate unknown to us, a fate written in invisible ink.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes

“Great works impoverish us and must always impoverish us. They rid us of the superfluous. After reading them, we inevitably emerge emptied: enriched, but enriched through subtraction.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes

“That’s all man is: a creature you can feel pity for.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“You know this: colonization sows despair, death, and chaos among the colonized. But it also sows—and this is its most diabolical triumph—the desire to become one’s destroyer.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“I don’t think we should chase ghosts; I think we should join their dance around the fire and, soaked in fear down to our bones, teeth clattering, shitting our pants, take our place and our piece of the past, every last crumb.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“But therein lies all the beauty of childhood: it exists to be betrayed, and that betrayal is the birth of nostalgia, the only sentiment that allows us, one day perhaps, at the other end of life, to rediscover the pureness of youth.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“he found his true country in literature; maybe the only one.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“And when his phantom steps towards me, it will formulate the terrible existential choice that was the dilemma of his life; the choice about which every man obsessed with literature will always hesitate in his heart: to write, not to write.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes

“time remains the perennial teacher.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“We forget that children have their own melancholy to carry, and for better or worse, they may feel it more intensely,”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“We were the three points of a triangle of bitter memories, of questions without answers, of loathing and love. We knew we were linked and we hated each other for it.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“When she emerged from childhood, her beauty had erupted like the sun revolting against a thousand-year dictatorship of the night.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“The gap between us deepened. It was no longer measured in minutes but in worlds.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“not to adopt their ways, but to learn to defend himself when they say that not only is their way of seeing the best way, which is debatable, but it’s the only way, which is wrong.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“After all, man can’t go against the current of history the way some fish go against the river current; he can only descend toward the great delta, the very tip of his destiny, before flinging himself into the great sea.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“And what’s happening is that this country is going to belong to the whites.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“But a scapegoat was needed: it was the crocodile.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“An internal suffering, which only went after the flesh once it had completely eroded the soul over many years.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“But this silence isn’t a void; it is always filled with the tumult of endless hypotheses, possible answers, and immediate doubts that arise.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men

“o que havia me ligado a ele era a mesma fé desesperada que depositávamos na enteléquia da vida, encarnada para nós pela literatura. Não pensávamos de modo algum que ela pudesse salvar o mundo; ao contrário, pensávamos que ela era o único meio de não se salvar do mundo.”
― Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes