“I arrived at Dover... Well-intentioned people had warned the customs authorities of my arrival and of the nature of the effects I brought with me; so my trunks were emptied...and each thing they contained was unfolded and scrutinized with the most minute exactitude.”

“The Egyptian officers informed me that I would be denied entry, and I was soon deported back to Yemen on the same plane on which I had arrived. The authorities gave me no clear answer why: They said that I knew the reason for my deportation better than them, and that my name had been blacklisted based on the request of a security body.”

“I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”
Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque ut pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam.

“So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.”

“I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.”

“Once there arrived in Delhi some female infidel captives, ten of whom the Vazir sent to me. I gave one of them to the man who had brought them… My companion took three young girls, and I do not know what happened to the rest.”

“I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”

“I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.”

“Beyond myself, somewhere,
I wait for my arrival.”

“I was writing to my wife when your letter arrived, and now I want to look at her portrait myself, seeing the great beauty it contains. I am such a devoted husband that other beautiful women now do nothing for me.”