“And she was someone else because of what he had said to her today. From early on it was the way he spoke to her, to the inside of her, not around her, over her head, around her shoulders. That was how others spoke to her, their words bouncing against her skin and ears, cascading, and she perfectly still, untouched, always alone. If he would speak to her all the time, everyday. If all of life could be like that. The light in her head was too bright to see what was in the room. She couldn’t see the suitcases anymore, the bed she leant against as she sat on the floor, the bottle of perfume he had given her. She couldn’t see.”
"... the fog cleared and I awoke, on the second day of my arrival, in my familiar bed in the room whose walls had witnessed the trivial incidents of my life in childhood and the onset of adolescence... I heard the cooing of the turtledove, and I looked through the window at the palm tree standing in the courtyard of our house... I looked at its strong straight trunk, at its roots that strike down to the ground, at the green branches hanging down loosely over its top, and I experienced a feeling of assurance. I felt not like stormswept feather but like that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots... " ~ Tayeb Salih
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