|
c2f9ad0
|
I was saddened to find it in such a state- no, no more than saddened, I was shamed. This was where I came from, this was my provenance, and it smacked of lowliness. But as I reacclimatized and my surroundings once again became familiar, it occurred to me that the house had not changed in my absence. I had changed. I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner, but that particular type of entitled and unsympathetic American who so anno..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
d4ab8f4
|
Is getting filthy rich still your goal above all goals, your be-all and end-all, the mist-shrouded high-altitude spawning pond to your inner salmon?
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
52330aa
|
She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, ad there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, yo..
|
|
death
inspirational
life
love
old-age
poignant
self-help
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
57db855
|
I have this thing about friends and secrets. Sometimes when I meet a person I like, I tell them a secret they don't know me well enough to be told. It lets me judge their potential as a friend.
|
|
friendship
judge
judging-others
judging-people
loyalty
secrets
sharing-secrets
trust
trustworthiness
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
086c1de
|
I walk in the direction she tells me. I feel my pores opening, sweat and heat radiating out of my body. A firefly dances in the distance, leaving tracers, and if I turn my head from side to side, I see long yellow-green streaks that cut through my vision and burn in front of my retinas even after the light that sparked them has gone. I emerge from the mango grove into a field. In the distance unseen trucks pass with a sound like the ocean l..
|
|
fireflies
nature
pakistan
pores
trace
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
27a0386
|
They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.
|
|
power
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
689f1e0
|
Didn't you tell me smoking ruined your stamina as a boxer? ... Ruined is a strong word, I'd say. ... It helps fight boredom. It gives you more to do and less time to do it in.
|
|
cigarettes-smoking
smoking
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
367f546
|
Darashikoh was inside, for all the world a tastefully dressed patron of the shop, but he carried death in his undershorts and hunger in his heart.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
e0b4d94
|
Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ded43ec
|
Language lacks the power to describe Faith.
|
|
language
power
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2a6177a
|
Secrets make life more interesting. You can be in a crowded room with someone and touch them without touching, just with a look, because they know a part of you no one else knows. And whenever you're with them, the two of you are alone, because the you they see no one else can.
|
|
connection-with-people
friendship
inspirational
knowing-a-person
loyalty
secrets
sharing
sharing-secrets
soul
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ea8abf4
|
Young men pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honor the goodness of the men who raised them,
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9f9a3d3
|
The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they're not particularly fattening. So don't share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
8deb7c8
|
like Pakistan, America is, after all, a former English colony...
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
b541e4d
|
But even now the city's freewheeling virtual world stood in stark contrast to the day-to-day lives of most people, to those of young men, and especially of young women, and above all of children who went to sleep unfed but could see on some small screen people in foreign lands preparing and consuming and even conducting food fights with feasts of such opulence that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9d713aa
|
He was a man who discovered love through his penis.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2ccae41
|
You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way, down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
6862957
|
From the perspective of the world's national security apparatuses you exist in several locations. You appear on property and income-tax registries, on passport and ID card databases. You show up on passenger manifests and telephone logs . . . You are fingertip swirls, facial ratios, dental records, voice patterns, spending trails, e-mail threads.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
200a2f3
|
I tried not to dwell on the comparison; it was one thing to accept that New York was more wealthy than Lahore, but quite another to swallow the fact that Manila was as well.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
79bd1b2
|
A revolver is) just a tool, really, like stapler. A stapler that punch through a person. Pin them. Drive blunt metal through flesh and bone.
|
|
flesh
pin
punch
revolver
stapler
tool
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9b4d30d
|
chovek nevinagi mozhe da v'zstanovi lichnite si granitsi, sled kato e dopusnal da b'dat razmiti i prekracheni ot drugo choveshko s'shchestvo v protsesa na romantichna vr'zka: kolkoto i da se opitvame ne mozhem da v'zv'rnem onazi avtonomnost na lichnostta, koiato sme si v'obraziavali che pritezhavame
|
|
relationships
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ea062c6
|
She sees how you diminish her solitude, and, more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires an I can have for a you, the desire that you be less lonely.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
b056bf9
|
A third layer of nativeness was composed of those whom others thought directly descended, even the tiniest fraction of their genes, from the human beings who had been brought from Africa centuries ago as slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in proportion of the rest, it had vast importance, for society had been shaped in reaction to it. An unspeakable violence had occurred in relation to it, and yet it endured, fertile, a str..
|
|
history-repeating-itself
immigrants
immigration
natives
slavery
slaves
u-s-history
us-history
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
47ea7b9
|
It seemed to me then - and to be honest, sir, seems to me still - that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not..
|
|
government
pakistan
terrorism
war
war-on-terror
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
289ed33
|
So what's Pakistan like?" she asked. I told her Pakistan was many things, from seaside to desert to farmland stretched between rivers and canals; I told her that I had driven with my parents and my brother to China on the Karakoram Highway, passing along the bottoms of valleys higher than the tops of the Alps; I told her that alcohol was illegal for Muslims to buy and so I had a Christian bootlegger who delivered booze to my house in a Suzu..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
8f2443b
|
Some men drink the blood of other men, all I drink is wine.
|
|
sin
wine
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
380f85a
|
No believer is a bad believer.
|
|
inspirational
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
730d769
|
one's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
6d8d142
|
the fact that Urdu was spoken by taxicab drivers; the presence, only two blocks from my East Village apartment, of a samosa- and channa-serving establishment called the Pak-Punjab Deli; the coincidence of crossing Fifth Avenue during a parade and hearing, from loudspeakers mounted on the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Association float, a song to which I had danced at my cousin's wedding. In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the mi..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2231aea
|
I met her eyes, and for the first time I perceived that there was something broken behind them, like a tiny crack in a diamond that becomes visible only when viewed through a magnifying lens; normally it is hidden by the brilliance of the stone.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
8a63813
|
We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9d66501
|
It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.
|
|
connection
love
relationships
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
5c0aeff
|
Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
3a44c11
|
Saeed wanted to feel for Nadia what he had always felt for Nadia, and the potential loss of this feeling left him unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9103209
|
Without being conscious of it, you have allowed yourself to become fond of him not for the content of his character but for the fidelity of his echo.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
f5a4cf2
|
It leaves space for your thoughts to echo
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
fac99d5
|
She thought she mattered little to him, but in this she was mistaken, as the musician was quite smitten, and not nearly so unattached to her as she supposed, but pride, and also fear, and also style, kept him from asking more of her than she offered up.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
8622871
|
it is not always possible to restore one's boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us.
|
|
identity-crisis
relationships
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ebb6b4c
|
Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization's brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the creation of global institutions based on one-person-one-vote and equa..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
1cb0bfa
|
He whispers a benediction and breathes it into the air, spreading his hope for you with a contraction of the lungs.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
1a6efde
|
for personalities are not a single immutable colour, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
d320869
|
What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings -- younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older...
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
84cb421
|
a beautiful memory one knows has already commenced to fade. *
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
b71e1d0
|
The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.
|
|
migration
refugees
violence
|
Mohsin Hamid |