Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain. - V. S. Naipaul

It [Islam] has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'... This abolition of the self demanded by Muslims was worse than the similar colonial abolition of identity. It is much, much worse in fact... You cannot just say you came out of nothing.

No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.

I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.