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"There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse."

"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."

"The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities."

"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable."

"The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past."
Explore more quotes by Naguib Mahfouz

"I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature."

"Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred."

"There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see."

"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."

"My countrymen have the right to shake my hand and talk to me if they so wish. Don't forget that their support and their reading of my works is what brought me the Nobel prize."

"We used the Western style to express our own themes and stories. But don't forget that our heritage includes The Thousand and One Nights."
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