Ibrahim al-Koni quotes
1948 – · Libya, 20th–21st centuries · Tuareg novelist, writer and journalist
About Ibrahim al-Koni
Born 1948 in Ghadames, Fezzan (Libya), he grew up in Tuareg Tamasheq culture and learned written Arabic in adolescence. He studied comparative literature at Moscow’s Maxim Gorky Institute and worked as a journalist in Moscow and Warsaw. Author of over eighty books, he makes the desert a moral and spiritual landscape shaped by Tuareg mythology, Sufi elements and ecological concerns.
Works: The Bleeding of the Stone; Gold Dust; Anubis; The Seven Veils of Seth
Quotes
“It is said that we become part of everything we loved too much.”
Source: al‑Waram (The Tumor), 2008 · Check the source
Verified attributionWhat we know
- What is documented
- The idea is reliably attributable to Ibrahim al‑Koni and is found in passages of al‑Waram.
- What remains uncertain
- The circulating wording is likely an abridged or modernized rendering of the novel's passages; the exact printed punctuation of that wording is not independently established.
This line warns that loving something beyond measure erodes personal autonomy: the lover is gradually absorbed into the loved object. The idea appears in Ibrahim al‑Koni's novel al‑Waram (The Tumor, 2008), where excessive attachment is treated as an allegory of destructive possession.