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3538640
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E cosi, qualunque fosse la ragione, quella volta la moderazione ebbe la meglio, e l'audacia, perche ci vuole coraggio a non attaccare quando si ha paura
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Mohsin Hamid |
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9bcdd84
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Da parte sua, Saeed avrebbe voluto poter fare qualcosa per Nadia, poterla proteggere da quel che li aspettava, per quanto, a un certo livello, capisse che amare significa accettare che inevitabilmente un giorno non riuscirai a proteggere quel che hai di piu prezioso.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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afc79c8
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Quando pregava, entrava in contatto coi suoi genitori, con cui altrimenti non avrebbe piu potuto entrare in contatto, ed entrava in contatto con la sensazione che siamo tutti figli che abbiamo perso i nostri genitori, tutti, ogni uomo e donna e ragazzo e ragazza, e noi verremo persi da coloro che verranno dopo di noi e ci ameranno, e questo lutto unisce l'umanita, unisce ogni essere umano, la natura fugace del nostro essere qui, il nostro d..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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6c2276a
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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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40458ff
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It's easy to be an idealist when you drive a Pajero.
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money
wealth
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Mohsin Hamid |
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fccf46a
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Would you like your money starched, sir? Box or hanger? Thanks for using GloboBank.
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money-laundering
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Mohsin Hamid |
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2a96e83
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Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimize the importance of the individual and maximize the importance of the group.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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61406e6
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Human beings don't necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered, or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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758dcf8
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Nadia's experiences during her first months as a single woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did.
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woman
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Mohsin Hamid |
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aa598b1
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I can understand it," she said. "Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived." "Millions arrived in our country," Saeed replied. "When there were wars nearby." "That was different. Our country was poor. We didn't feel we had as much to lose." --
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Mohsin Hamid |
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ac033a0
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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 know has already commenced to fade.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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54777e9
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A woman walks by the gate, leading a little boy with a balloon of hunger in his belly and hair bleached by malnutrition.
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poverty
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Mohsin Hamid |
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a559803
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So Erica felt better in a place like this, separated from the rest of us, where people could live in their minds without feeling bad about it.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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33531e8
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I could not respect how he functioned so completely immersed in the structures of his professional micro-universe. Yes, I too had previously derived comfort from my firm's exhortations to focus intensely on work, but now I saw that in this constant striving to realize a financial future, no thought was given to the critical personal and political issues that affect one's emotional present. In other words, my blinders were coming off, and I ..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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044a152
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My mind disappears behind desperate terror.
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fear
terror
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Mohsin Hamid |
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ed6a309
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If the choice is between being held up at gunpoint or holding the gun, only a madman would choose to hand over his wallet rather than fill it with someone else's cash.
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stealing
theft
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Mohsin Hamid |
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e97c7c9
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So long awaited that its coming was a shock.
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shock
wait
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Mohsin Hamid |
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3886bdf
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Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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2dad721
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I feel the illusion I've twirled around me like a sari start to come undone and fall to my feet.
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illusion
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Mohsin Hamid |
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e6b67af
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the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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6b991a9
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She had bumped me out of the center of my world. I'd become a baby person, and it felt good, better than what had come before.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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6c86991
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for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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e31706c
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If one had asked Manucci during his days as a street urchin, as he sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah, Manucci would probably have said that ACs were hot. The first time he saw one jutting out into the street from the wall of a shop in the old city, he walked up to the noisy box and was amazed at the blast of hot air it sent straight into his face. Why do people turn on hot air in the middle of summer? he often..
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air-conditioning
lahore
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Mohsin Hamid |
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64f24bd
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Although I proudly admit to being a robber (attaching as I do a certain prestige to my calling), I must make it quite clear, so clear that there is no room for doubt, that I am not a murderer. And while it is true that outlaws of both departments are schooled by the faculty of lawlessness, it is equally true that they are separated by a moral chasm as vast as the difference in syllabi which divides BA candidates from those pursuing a BSc.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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d1c5939
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A little paranoia crawls into my lap, purring loudly.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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0894554
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Not that he isn't horrible to most of the planet, he is. But if Ozi loves you, you know it. You can swim in it, get a tan. Or rest in its shade, if you'd rather.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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0993cfc
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I love it when you talk about where you come from," she said, slipping her arm through mine, "you become so alive."
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Mohsin Hamid |
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df02578
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Hoarse voice, from intimacy's border with asthma: parched beaches, dust whipped by the wind. Very sexy but not much to drink.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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c81ad40
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Power comes from becoming change.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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ea41255
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It was a summer of great rumblings in the belly of the earth, of atomic flatulence and geopolitical indigestion, consequences of the consumption of sectarian chickpeas by our famished and increasingly incontinent subcontinent. Clenched beneath the tightened sphincters of test sites and silos, the pressure of superheated gases was registering in spasms on the Richter scale. Lahore was uneasy, and Immodium in short supply.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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2a7e937
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and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.
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humanity
mortality
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Mohsin Hamid |
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1d5ba2b
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I get in, and she turns the music down. It's Nusrat, remixed and clubby, but damn good as always.
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nusrat-fateh-ali-khan
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Mohsin Hamid |
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23938fb
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A raindrop strikes the lawn, sending up a tiny plume of dust. Others follow, a barrage of dusty explosions bursting all around me. The leaves of the banyan tree rebound from their impact. The parrots disappear from sight. In the distance, the clouds seem to reach down to touch the earth. And then a curtain of water falls quietly and shatters across the city with a terrifying roar, drenching me instantly. I hear the hot concrete of the drive..
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monsoon
rain
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Mohsin Hamid |
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b3e8b39
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I like its eyes: two black dots, nonreflective light-trappers. Utterly determined eyes, doubt-free, unselfconscious. Frightening eyes if they happen to be looking at you and you're small enough to be dinner. The same eyes a man probably sees on an alligator before it drags him down and shakes the air out of his lungs and leaves him to rot a little in the murk, to be tenderized properly before he becomes a meal.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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141a862
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Now, though, in Marin, Saeed prayed even more, several times a day, and he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. 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 ..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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b145e8e
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I found it ironic; children and the elderly were meant to be sent away from impending battles, but in our case it was the fittest and brightest who were leaving, those who in the past would have been most expected to remain.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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f87bab4
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but I would suggest that it is instead our solitude that most disturb us, the fact that we are all but alone despite being in the heart of a city.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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d0ab922
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Indeed, all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be said to be offered to the reader as a form of self-help. Textbooks, those whores, as particularly explicit in acknowledging this, and it is with a textbook that you, at this moment, after several years in the city, are walking down the street.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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7bb5bb0
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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.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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4620230
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The alliance between the US and Pakistan is thus predominantly between the US and the Pakistani military.
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Mohsin Hamid |
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83afe32
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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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Mohsin Hamid |
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0672bb7
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Saeed and Nadia knew what the buildup to conflict felt like, and so the feeling that hung over London in those days was not new to them, and they faced it not with bravery, exactly, and not with panic either, not mostly, but instead with a resignation shot through with moments of tension, with tension ebbing and flowing, and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the fou..
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Mohsin Hamid |
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ce570a1
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There was also closeness, for the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things.
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closeness
deah
love
temporariness
time
value
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Mohsin Hamid |
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050a997
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They knew there was a possibility the agent had sold them out to the militants, and so they knew there was a possibility this was the final afternoon of their lives.
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Mohsin Hamid |