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For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.

Hanif Kureishi

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Hanif Kureishi
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: December 5
Author
Film Director
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Walks
Fundamentally
Hell
Elected
Went
Birthday
Fled
Life
Blind
Raped
People
Died
Nixon
Husband
Blonde
Couldn
Forgot
Walk
Mum

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Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind
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If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I'd imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth.
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Love cannot be measured by its duration.
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You can't spend your life beating yourself up for something that happened yesterday. You die if you don't follow your desire.
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Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
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Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live. … Why can’t they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?
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Dear God, teach me to be careless.
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It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do?
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Almost certainly I will not tell her my intentions this evening or tonight. I will put it off. Why? Because words are actions and they make things happen. Once they are out you cannot put them back.
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You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.
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The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
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I can't sleep with you tonight, baby, my head's all messed up, you've no idea. It's somewhere else and it's full of voices and songs and bad things.
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Falling in love was simple one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining love, was bloody work, and not a soft job.
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But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.
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