Tayeb Salih quotes
1929 – 2009 · Sudan, 20th century · novelist and short‑story writer, journalist and cultural administrator
About Tayeb Salih
Born 12 July 1929 in Karmakol on the Nile and died 18 February 2009 in London, Tayeb Salih studied in Sudan and in Britain. Author of novels and stories — notably Season of Migration to the North (1966) and The Wedding of Zein — his fiction focuses on village life, colonial education, migration and questions of Sudanese identity.
Works: Season of Migration to the North; The Wedding of Zein; A Handful of Dates; Bandarshah
Quotes
“Everyone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless state of childhood.”
Source: Season of Migration to the North, p. 88 (Heinemann, 1991) · Check the source
Verified attributionWhat we know
- What is documented
- Verified as a line from Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, spoken by the unnamed narrator and cited in the Heinemann English edition (1991).
- What remains uncertain
- Page numbers differ across English editions; the line is a narrator's utterance in the novel rather than a standalone authorial maxim.
In Season of Migration to the North the line captures a central ambivalence: travel opens learning and possibility, yet humanity remains unfinished—childlike, prone to repetition and misjudgment. It is spoken by the novel's unnamed narrator and carries the book's ironic tension about wanderlust.