"I looked at the river - its waters had begun to take on a cloudy look with the alluvial mud brought down by the rains that must have poured in torrents on the hills of Ethiopia - and at the men with their bodies leaning against the ploughs or bent over their hoes, and my eyes take in fields flat as the palm of a hand, right up to the edge of the desert where the houses stand. I hear a bird sing or a dog bark or the sound of an axe on wood - and I feel a sense of stability, I feel that I am important, that I am continuous and integral. No, I am not a stone thrown into the water but seed sown in a field. I go to my grandfather and he talks to me of life forty years ago, fifty years ago, even eighty, and my feeling of security is strengthened."
~Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
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"Suddenly, a thought blew up in his mind. Those people were his own, a big tribe of which he was a member. Yet they are foreign to him, he is a stranger amongst them. A few years earlier he was a living cell in the harmonious body of the tribe." (Tayeb Salih, 1960)
"Exile from one's own country is very painful, but exile in one's own country is even worse. I used to dream of home and wake up trembling. I would be scared of a return that would mean an end, of a comeback that would not be like that of a grain that goes back to the earth to live and grow, but like that of a leaf that falls and soils the ground. I would dread the thought that because I could not live rootless, you would believe that I could live like roots in lethargy, darkness and ice." (Tawfiq Sayigh)
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