“My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them.”
Hanif Kureishi“My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them.”
Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy“I can only think how good life on earth can be, at times. What grief two people can give to one another! And what pleasure!”
Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy“Dear God, teach me to be careless.”
Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy“I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. 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, Intimacy“You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.”
Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy“Security and safety were the reward of dullness.”
Hanif Kureishi“Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.”
Hanif Kureishi“Just as my body had changed at puberty, now I was developing a sense of guilt, a sense not only of how I appeared to others, but of how I appeared to myself, especially in violating self-imposed prohibitions.”
Hanif Kureishi“As it was, she always did whatever occurred to her, which was, admittedly, not difficult for someone in her position, coming from a background where rick of failure was minimal; in fact, you had to work hard to fail in her world.”
Hanif Kureishi“Freud wrote that love involves the undervaluation of reality and the overvaluation of the desired object. While the correct valuation of a person is an odd, if not impossible idea, we might say Freud meant something like this: for various reasons, many of them masochistic, we become involved with others who cannot possibly give what we ask for; we can wait as long as we wish, but they do not have it, and one day, if we bear to abandon our fantasy and see clearly, we might face reality straight on. We will then look elsewhere for fulfillment, to a place where our needs can, in fact, be satisfied.”
Hanif Kureishi