Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live. … Why can’t they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?
—Hanif Kureishi
Topics: Happiness
No amount of promises can guarantee love
—Hanif Kureishi
Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.
—Hanif Kureishi
You don’t stop loving someone just because you hate them.
—Hanif Kureishi
What a quality of innocence people have when they don’t expect to be harmed.
—Hanif Kureishi
Topics: Unity
How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.
—Hanif Kureishi
Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.
—Hanif Kureishi
Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.
—Hanif Kureishi
Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining love, was bloody work, and not a soft job.
—Hanif Kureishi
Love cannot be measured by its duration…
—Hanif Kureishi
I don’t want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.
—Hanif Kureishi
At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others.
—Hanif Kureishi
Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted
—Hanif Kureishi
At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?
—Hanif Kureishi
If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity—to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future—a declaration that things can be not only different but better.
—Hanif Kureishi
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Ian McEwan (b.1948) British Novelist, Short-story Writer
- Laurence Housman English Novelist, Dramatist
- J. R. R. Tolkien British Philologist, Writer
- Charles Reade British Author
- Jerome K. Jerome English Humorist, Novelist
- Edward Lear English Humorist, Illustrator
- Peter Ustinov British Actor, Playwright
- Wilkie Collins English Novelist, Playwright
- Patrick White Australian Novelist
- Stephen Fry English Actor, Writer
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