Tayeb Salih

"They are my responsibility, and one of the reasons that brings me here each year is to see how they are getting on."

"I had not thought of the boys during the whole of the ghastly journey. I had been thinking of her. Again I said to Mahjoub: What happened?"

"I told him that Mustafa Saeed was a lie. Do you want to know the truth about Mustafa Saeed? I said to him with another drunken laugh."

"The world has turned suddenly upside down. Love? Love does not do this. This is hatred. I feel hatred and seek revenge; my adversary is within and I needs (sic) must confront him. Even so, there is still in my mind a modicum of sense that is aware of the irony of the situation. I begin from where Mustafa Saeed had left off. Yet he at least made a choice, while I have chosen nothing."

"But I would hope you will not entertain the idea, dear sirs, that Mustafa Saeed had become an obsession that was ever with me in my comings and goings. Sometimes months would pass without his crossing my mind. In any case, he had died, by drowning or by suicide - God alone knows."

"It was a steamingly hot July night, the Nile that year having experienced one of those floodings that occur once every twenty or thirty years and become legendary - something for fathers to talk to their sons about."

"It is a chaotic house, built without method, and has acquired its present form over many years: many differently-sized rooms, some built up against one another at different times, either because they were needed or because my grandfather found himself with some spare money for which he had no other use."

"I had put out the candles and locked the door of the room and that of the courtyard without doing anything. Another fire would not have done any good."