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b02ecd8
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Our relationship could now thrive only in my head, and to discuss it with a mother intent--admittedly in my own best interest--on challenging it with reality might do it irreparable harm.
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thoughts
relationships
memories
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Mohsin Hamid |
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21f1d57
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the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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8117098
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It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself, (...), and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now, and the result was something not unlike relief.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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74ac396
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Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops -- like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as .
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Mohsin Hamid |
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ba1ec1f
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You have to have money these days. The roads are falling apart, so you need a Pajero or a Land Cruiser. The phone lines are erratic, so you need a mobile. The colleges are overrun with fundos who have no interest in getting an education, so you have to go abroad. And that's ten lakhs a year, mind you. Thanks to electricity theft there will always be shortages, so you have to have a generator. The police are corrupt and ineffective, so you n..
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money
earning
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Mohsin Hamid |
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bd8d19a
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Our coerced silence is the weapon that has been sharpened and brought to our throats. This is why Nawaz Sharif's statement in defence of Ahmadis met with such an angry response. Because the heart of the issue isn't whether Ahmadis are non-Muslims or not. The heart of the issue is whether Muslims can be silenced by fear. Because if we can be silenced when it comes to Ahmadis, then we can be silenced when it comes to Shias, we can be silenced..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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990c3ef
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Wings that had been growing for years stretched and pushed and I found myself flying.
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freedom
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Mohsin Hamid |
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341df71
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and in any case Nadia had taken one look at Saeed's father and felt him like a father, for he was so gentle, and evoked in her a protective caring, as if for one's own child, or for a puppy, or for a beautiful memory one knows has already commenced to fade.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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3d8a3c5
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Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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5e57170
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Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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911d968
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Sled obiad imakhme prakticheski uprazhneniia, prednaznacheni da ni zapoznaiat s kompiut'rni programi kato PowerPoint, Excel i Access. Za tozi kurs sediakhme v polukr'g okolo blag instruktor s vid na bibliotekar; Ueinrait tutaksi nareche meropriiatieto
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Mohsin Hamid |
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a36a227
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Information is key at these things: no one wants to be caught holding social stock that's about to crash.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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ba629ab
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Many parents were strict, and sometimes weeks would pass without us being able to meet those we thought of as our girlfriends. So we learned to savor the denial of gratification--that most un-American of pleasures!--and I for one could subsist quite happily on a diet of emails such as that which I have just described.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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9abde13
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Often, during my stay in your country, such comparisons troubled me. In fact, they did more than trouble me: they made me resentful. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had univ..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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61295fb
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What distinguishes the "war on terror" is that it is a war against a concept, not a nation. And the enemy concept, it seems to me, is pluralism."
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Mohsin Hamid |
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0f4d07b
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People often ask me if I am the book's Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man's conversation with himself.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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f4796ee
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He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online. It seemed to Nadia that the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was unambiguously gone.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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cc4df43
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The privileged liberal position: "There should be equal rights for all; I should not have to share my riches with the poor."
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Mohsin Hamid |
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fb668e9
|
All sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was, even the homeless ones who spoke no English, more at home maybe because they were younger, and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can't help it. We are all migrants through time.
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time
people
life
migrants
migration
house
home
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Mohsin Hamid |
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0aa81e7
|
It's amazing what the gene pool will do to perpetuate itself.
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life
perpetuation
procreation
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Mohsin Hamid |
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3f6eaa5
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You learn a lot about your man when you become the mother of his child.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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0bd96cb
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You know you're in trouble when you can't meet a woman's eye.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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e4ad8e8
|
There's a reason prophets perform miracles: language lacks the power to describe faith. And you have to land on faith before you can even begin to hike around to its flip side, betrayal.
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relationships
faith
trust
trustworthiness
prophets
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Mohsin Hamid |
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e3a93d9
|
Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done, to corral and bloody and where necessary slaughter the migrants, and had determined that some other way would have to be found. Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguish..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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7ecbcde
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What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered, and if necessary was worth a fight.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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5cd0c80
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In many places, the past fifteen years have been a time of economic turmoil and widening disparities. Anger and resentment are high. And yet economic policies that might address these concerns seem nearly impossible to enact. Instead of the seeds of reform, we are given the yoke of misdirection. We are told to forget the sources of our discontent because something more important is at stake: the fate of our civilization. Yet what are these ..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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57308b8
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Saeed's father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a particular shawl worn on a particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects that took her into Saeed's past, a book or a music collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked emotions from her own childhood, and jagged mus..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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0093158
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our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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0be38e3
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if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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fcf6c3d
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The effect doors had on people altered as well. Rumors had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country. Some people claimed to know people who knew people who had been through such doors. A normal door, they said, could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all. Most people thought these rumors to be nonsense, the sup..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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e349d7e
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But I must admit that my motives were no entirely noble; there were in me at least some elements of the anger and hurt vanity that characterize a spurned lover, and these unworthy sentiments helped me to keep my distance.
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love
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Mohsin Hamid |
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458666c
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In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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83b3e17
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We are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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f0df40f
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Pride tells me to give it back, but common sense tells pride to shut up, have a joint and relax. I shrug and put the note into my wallet.
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wallet
note
pride
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Mohsin Hamid |
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9e60130
|
Ozi made me feel so known. He made love to my insides, filling desperate gaps and calming unbearably sensitive places.
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loneliness
love
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Mohsin Hamid |
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fd983c6
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I know I'm standing still, but I feel like I've stumbled and I'm starting to fall.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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a5d4444
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Lightning's echo comes as thunder. And the city waits for thunder's echo, for a wall of heat that burns Lahore with the energy of a thousand summers, a million partitions, a billion atomic souls split in half.
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rain
lahore
heat
summer
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Mohsin Hamid |
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02d7a48
|
Det er forbloffende hvor stemningsfull kunstig belysning kan vaere nar det har begynt a morkne, hvordan den kan pavirke oss folelsmessig, selv na, ved begynnelsen av det enogtyvende arhundre, i byer sa store og godt opplyst som denne.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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a4ebd20
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When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to ackn..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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3ae5b74
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Perhaps it is because novels are like affairs, and small novels - with fewer pages of plot to them - are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs are still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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12b7285
|
The blast wave that passed through my sister's office doubtless passed through devout Muslims, atheist Muslims, gay Muslims, funny Muslims, and lovestruck Muslims--not to mention Pakistani Christians, Chinese engineers, American security contractors, and Indian Sikhs. What civilization, then, did the bomb target? And from what civilization did it originate?
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Mohsin Hamid |
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14e0320
|
when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography
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Mohsin Hamid |
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80dc93e
|
But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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964eff1
|
Yes, we have acquired a certain familiarity with the recent history of our surroundings, and that--in my humble opinion--allows us to put the present into much better perspective.
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Mohsin Hamid |