|
da25403
|
Not--please understand me--that I was convinced that I had made a mistake; no, I was merely unconvinced that I had not made a mistake. I was, in other words, confused.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
f2c3a59
|
we learned to savor the denial of gratification--that most un-American of pleasures!--
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9e110f7
|
She slips her arm around my shoulders and cradles my head against her breast. We breathe together. Slowly. Time passes, flowing, a long, less and less painful sigh. And I shut my eyes. Pain becomes only physical again. Fear recedes. Anger flickers for a moment longer, gas in the pipes after the stove has been turned off. She says, "I'll take care of you." And I feel gratitude and happiness rise up inside me: old friends, long-forgotten and ..
|
|
love
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
59d4b20
|
most powerful military in the world is sent to do a task best accomplished by schoolteachers, police forces, persuasion, and time.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
437f8fe
|
She's finished her cigarette but hasn't put it out properly, so it's still smoking in the ashtray. I crush mine into it, grinding until both stop burning.
|
|
love
passion
smoke
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
bf9170a
|
Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her from what would come, even 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. He thought she deserved better than this, but he could see no way out, for they had decided not to run, not to play roulette with yet another departure. To flee forever is beyond the capacity ..
|
|
love
protection
running
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
fc6b4f5
|
It is odd, isn't it? Whenever I read something interesting, I tear out a piece and keep it as a talisman until I find something new to replace it with. It's a sort of superstition. I did it once and it helped me break out of writer's block, so I've done it ever since. Librarians must hate me.
|
|
books
librarian
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
a70f64a
|
In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be.
|
|
connectivity
internet
mobile-phones
phones
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
8a9e29e
|
A single strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie's concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism... I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage.
|
|
terrorism
war
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
0a29ee7
|
There is something magical about London. It can coax a water lily to tie its roots to land.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
f5120c4
|
and 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.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
fbdca20
|
As he sat he felt the outside of her thigh, firm, against his, and she felt the outside of his, likewise firm, against hers. She said, "Aren't you going to take that off?" She meant the black robe, which he had forgotten he was wearing, and he looked down at himself and over at her, and smiled, and answered, "You first." She laughed. "Together, then." "Together." They stood and pulled off their robes, facing each other, and underneath both ..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
c7699e7
|
LATER THAT DAY, in the evening, Nadia's time, the sun having slipped below her horizon, it was morning in the San Diego, California, locality of La Jolla, where an old man lived by the sea, or rather on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
04f0dd7
|
Once as Nadia sat on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank, she thought she saw online a photograph of herself sitting on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank, and she was startled and wondered how this could be. How she could both read this news and be this news. And how the newspaper could have..
|
|
mobile-phones
news
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
7da6520
|
Soon a rhythm was established, and it was thereafter rare that more than a few waking hours would pass without contact between them, and they found themselves in those early days of their romance growing hungry, touching each other, but without bodily adjacency, without release. They had begun, each of them, to be penetrated, but they had not yet kissed.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
480bd1b
|
Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so did their guests, and some of them wept, but Saeed had wept only once, when he first saw his mother's corpse and screamed, and Saeed's father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and h..
|
|
grief
loss
mourning
sorrow
weeping
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
c0173dd
|
When I wake, it seems a little less hot than usual, so I'm worried I have a fever until light flashes behind the curtains and the sound of a detonation rolls in with a force that makes the windows rattle. As I step outside with a plastic bag over my cast, a stiff breeze pulls my hair away from my face, and I see the pregnant clouds of the monsoon hanging low over the city. The rains have finally decided to come. I sit down on the lawn, rest..
|
|
monsoon
rain
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2da88dc
|
Children are excellent judges of character, you know
|
|
children
judging-others
judging-people
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
0e2ff9b
|
She's drawn to me just as I'm drawn to her. She can't keep away. She circles, forced to keep her distance, afraid of abandoning her husband and, even more, her son for too long. But she keeps coming, like a moth to my candle, staying longer than she should, leaving late for dinners and birthday parties, singeing her wings. She's risking her marriage for me, her family, her reputation. And I, the moth circling her candle, realize that she's ..
|
|
encircle
love
moth
passion
sufism
union
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
44bbbb0
|
I'm best in small doses, believe me.
|
|
excess
quantity
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
91916ea
|
Like Manhattan? Yes, precisely! And that was one of the reasons why for me moving to New York felt- so unexpectedly- like coming home. But there were other reasons as well: the fact that Urdu was spoken by taxi cab drivers; the presence, only two blocks from my East Village apartment, of a samosa-and china-serving establishment called the Pak-Punjab Deli; the coincidence of crossing Fifth Avenue during a parade and hearing, from loudspeaker..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
67330c0
|
for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
a9d2e45
|
Saeed was certain he was in love. Nadia was not certain what exactly she was feeling, but she was certain it had force. Dramatic circumstances, such as those in which they and other new lovers in the city now found themselves, have a habit of creating dramatic emotions, and furthermore the curfew served to conjure up an effect similar to that of a long-distance relationship, and long-distance relationships are well known for their potential..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
4468385
|
Saeed's father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend.
|
|
love
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
6c9a980
|
They are pursued by a pair of hawk-faced men dressed in black and white: both forbidding, both hungry, but one tall and slender, the other short and fat. Two reflections of the same soul in the cosmic house of mirrors, or uncanny coincidence? It is impossible to say.
|
|
moth-smoke
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ea91530
|
Lightning flickered above the city, a crescent moon sneered through a gap in the clouds. The boutique huddled against the storm, a tiny island of light on an unlit street.
|
|
storm
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
7f2e750
|
Mumtaz has six moles. Two are black: behind her ear and on her hip, in the trough of the wave that crests at her pelvis. Three are the color of rust: knuckle, corner of jaw, behind knee. And one is red, fiery, at the base of her spine, where a tail might grow. I touch them and know them because I watch her like a man in a field stares up at the stars, and I love her constellation because it contains her story and our story, and I wonder whi..
|
|
mole
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2889a36
|
But Saeed's father was thinking also of the future, even though he did not say this to Saeed, for he feared that if he said this to his son that his son might not go, and he knew above all else that his son must go, and what he did not say was that he had come to that point in a parent's life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one's child, contrary to all the instincts one had when one was younger, because holding on can..
|
|
old
old-age
son
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
900fe8d
|
My father liked to wonder aloud whether the phoenix was re-created by the fire of its funeral pyre or transformed so that what emerged was a soulless shadow of its former being, identical in appearance but without the joy in life its predecessor had had. He wondered alternatively whether the fire might be purificatory, a redemptive, rejuvenating blaze that destroyed the withered shell of the old phoenix and allowed the creature's essence to..
|
|
phoenix
rebirth
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
fcdf57c
|
People don't believe in consequences anymore.
|
|
effect
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9d6d66c
|
Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.
|
|
pleasures
worth-quotes
worthiness
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
38a8d6a
|
America is our enemy; America should give us more aid.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
557f359
|
ambitious cleric position: "Religion makes us all equal; only I decide what religion says."
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2807ae8
|
flying robots from an alien power regularly strike down from the skies and kill Pakistani citizens.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
77a999b
|
Saeed went with his father to pray on the first Friday after the curfew's commencement, and Saeed prayer for peace and Saeed's father prayed for Saeed and the preacher in his sermon urged all the congregants to pry for the righteous to emerge victorious in the war but carefully refrained from specifying on which side of the conflict he thought the righteous to be.
|
|
prayer
religion
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
835ebe7
|
Saeed went with his father to pray on the first Friday after the curfew's commencement, and Saeed prayed for peace and Saeed's father prayed for Saeed and the preacher in his sermon urged all the congregants to pry for the righteous to emerge victorious in the war but carefully refrained from specifying on which side of the conflict he thought the righteous to be.
|
|
prayer
religion
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
f40fda9
|
I just gritted my teeth, took out a needle, and worked him out of my heart like a splinter.
|
|
healing
moving-on-and-letting-go
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ccee79c
|
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..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
bf19495
|
if they had but waited and watched their relationship would have flowered again, and so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born. Jealousy
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
4164f28
|
Polite?" I said, less than radiant with joy. She smiled. "I don't mean it that way," she said. "Not being polite. Respectful polite. You give people their space. I really like that. It's unusual"
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
58bbb2b
|
They stood and pulled off their robes, facing each other, and underneath both were wearing jeans and sweaters, there being a nip in the air tonight, and his sweater was brown and loose and hers was beige and clung to her torso like a soft second skin. He attempted chivalrously not to take in the sweep of her body, his eyes holding hers, but of course, as we know often happens in such circumstances, he was unsure as to whether or not he had ..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
f65d810
|
It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class--in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding--but that is 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. ..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
aa2ba8a
|
One's relationship to windows now changed in the city. A window was the border through which death was possibly most likely to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside was a spot potentially in the crossfire. Moreover the pane of a window could itself become shrapnel so easily, shattered by a nearby blast, and everyone had heard of someone or other who had bled out ..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
40a9358
|
It was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict, 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 is destiny, respond the historians. War
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |