Let it Come Down: A Novel

And through it all, like an arhythmical percussive accompaniment there had been the constant metallic slamming of doors throughout the hotel, each one of which shook the flimsy edifice and resounded through it like a small blast.

The building had the kind of intense and pure shabbiness attained only by cheap new constructions.

It was typical: a victim always gave himself up if he had dared to dream of changing his status.

He was thinking that he should have answered anything that came to mind: money, happiness, health, rather than trying to say what he really meant.

Everything he took the trouble to look at carefully seemed to be bristling with an intense but undecipherable meaning: Daisy’s face with its halo of white pillows, the light pouring over the array of bottles on the table, the glistening black floor and the irregular black and white stripes on the skins at his feet, the darker and more distant parts

Because life is not a movement toward or away from anything; not even from the past to the future, or from youth to old age, or from birth to death. The whole of life does not equal the sum of its parts. It equals any one of the parts; there is no sum.

The important point with regard to Europeans, he claimed, was to sow chaos within their institutions and confuse them with seemingly irrational behavior.

Only it was rather difficult to make a scene with Hadija; she was inclined to sit back like a spectator and watch it, rather than participate in it.

She liked to remind herself that she came of pioneer stock; her grandmother had had an expression she had always loved to hear her use: “Marching orders have come,” which to her meant that if a thing had to be done, it was better to do it without question, without thinking whether one liked the idea or not.