Hisham Matar said this quote

And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.

~ Hisham Matar

There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy

~ Hisham Matar

Grief loves the hollow, all it wants is to hear its own echo.

~ Hisham Matar

Can you become a man without becoming your father?

~ Hisham Matar