#Quotes: Quotes from Nawal El Saadawi's God Dies by the Nile

The Sun rose up in the sky gradually. Its disc turned into a ball of fire, choking the wind, bearing down on the trees, turning everything into solid dryness, so that all things seemed to suffocate, burn in its red fire, and dry up, except the rivulets of sweat pouring down from Zakeya's face and body on to the ground. Beneath the sweat her face was livid like the face of the buffalo turning round and round in its yoke. [4]

[E]verything tastes bitter to the mouth of a peasant. [17]

Instead of painting her lashes with kohl, he had blinded her eyes. [17]

People have become corrupt everywhere,..., You can search in vain for Islam, for for a devout Muslim. They no longer exist. [20]

[O]ne cannot learn except at a high price. [37-8]

Since she was sure that the odour of godliness and moral uprightness smelt good and was pleasant to respire, she realized her nose was to blame for making the atmosphere around her smell like a latrine which was never washed down. [42]

In her ears echoed the words of Allah and between her thighs crept the hand of Sheikh Hamzawi. [44]

What matters is that we are all servants. No matter how high we rise, or how low we fall, the truth is that we are all slaves, serving someone. [68-9]

Suspicion requires that a man be endowed with a brain that can think. But these peasants! They have no brain, and when they do have one, it's like the brain of a buffalo. [69]

Those that go never come back, my child. [85]

I have not ceased praying and begging God to help us. And yet every day our misery becomes greater, and we are afflicted with new suffering. [86]

Her body was short and skinny with flat breasts, but her buttocks were big and shook violently as she whirled amidst the throngs of dancing people. [91]

Darkness lifted slightly and the light of dawn glimmered over the surface of the river revealing the tiny exhausted waves like wrinkles of an old, sad silent face that has resigned itself to its fate. [102]

[P]eople are like the waves of the sea, one can never tell when they might become stormy and why. [133]

And hunger makes a blind. It makes him see no one, neither ruler nor God. Hunger breeds heretics. [160]

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