Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.
Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.
Since the world began has any man ever been able to know what would happen tomorrow? The world of men is today. I’m asking you to open your heart today. Tomorrow belongs to Allah …
…It is far more sinful to pray irregularly than not to pray at all.
nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.
There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam.
Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded.
He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking.
How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we’re just so small.
the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind . . . [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.
May Allah bless you.” Or had she said: “May Allah burn you?” He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike.
Security is a false god begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost.