|
83afe32
|
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 |
|
0672bb7
|
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..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ce570a1
|
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.
|
|
time
love
closeness
deah
temporariness
value
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
050a997
|
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.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
6fa8d5e
|
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.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
aa16ae8
|
He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
256642a
|
From a distance she might be mistaken for a very young woman, while the maid seemed to have aged doubly, perhaps for them both, as if her occupation had been to age, to exchange the magic of months for bank notes and food.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
46105f2
|
maintaining a strict neutrality between the two potential combatants, a position that favoured, of course, the larger and [...] more belligerent of them.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
1e38103
|
Power comes from becoming change
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
e81bef2
|
She listened to me speak with a series of smiles, as though she were sipping at my descriptions and finding them to her taste
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
dc30d4f
|
the streets] enforce the ancient hierarchy that comes to us from the countryside: the superiority of the mounted man over the man on foot. But here [...] it is the man with four wheels who is forced to dismount and become part of the crowd
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ea82436
|
It's more of a novella than a novel. It leaves space for your thoughts to echo.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
b898f2f
|
The air is so dry, so clear, and there's so few people, almost no lights. And you can lie on your back and look up and see the Milky Way. All the stars like a splash of milk in the sky. And you see them slowly move. Because the Earth is moving. And you feel like you're lying on a giant spinning ball in space.
|
|
stars
existence
wonder
life
stargazing
the-milky-way
the-world
space
existentialism
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ed61db6
|
To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and awaits its fate, if only for a while.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
19e74d0
|
with towels so plush and fine that when she at last emerged she felt like a princess using them, or at least like the daughter of a dictator who was willing to kill without mercy in order for his children to pamper themselves with cotton such as this, to feel this exquisite sensation on their naked stomachs and thighs, towels that felt as if they had never been used before and might never be used again.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
11b0d13
|
that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
c253635
|
and since most people had little to barter with, they usually bartered with a promise of something to eat tomorrow or the next day in exchange for something to eat today, a bartering not so much of different goods, exactly, but of
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ee6c6ad
|
third layer of nativeness was composed of those who others thought directly descended, even in the tiniest fraction of their genes, from the human beings who had been brought from Africa to this continent centuries ago as slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in proportion to the rest, it had vast importance, for society had been shaped in reaction to it, and unspeakable violence had occurred in relation to it, and yet it endu..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
1fa836c
|
Here we are not squeamish when it comes to facing the consequences of our desire.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
a60722f
|
The island was pretty safe, they were told, except when it was not, which made it like most places.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
4c2335f
|
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 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..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
d670b6a
|
and it was an easy promise to make because she had at that time no thoughts of leaving Saeed, but it was also a difficult one because in making it she felt she was abandoning the old man, and even if he did have his siblings and his cousins, and might now go live with them or have them come live with him, they could not protect him as Saeed and Nadia could, and so by making the promise he demanded she make she was in a sense killing him, bu..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
3a1efee
|
and they fished and fished for hours, taking turns, but neither of them knew how to fish, or maybe they were just unlucky, and though they felt nibbles, they caught nothing, and it was as though they were merely feeding their bread to the insatiable brine
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2a04e82
|
the tobacco smell reminded him as it always did of his departed father, who would listen with him on his record player to audio recordings of science fiction adventures, and would pack and puff on his pipe, as sea creatures attacked a great submarine, the sounds of the wind and waves in the recording mixing with the sounds of the rain on their window, and the elderly man who was then a boy had thought, when I grow up I too will smoke, and h..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
4f917a4
|
Saeed admired his foreman, the foreman having that sort of quiet charisma that young men often gravitate towards, part of which lay in the native man's not seeming the least interested in being admired.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
c3ff46b
|
Young men pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honour the goodness of the men who raised them, and Saeed was very much a young man of this mould.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
f703a39
|
The old woman had become a rich woman on paper, the house now worth a fortune, and her children were always pestering her to sell it, saying she didn?t need all that space. But she told them to be patient, it would be theirs when she died, which wouldn?t be long now, and she said this kindly, to sharpen the bite of it, and to remind them how much they were motivated by money
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
e0c6269
|
The old woman had become a rich woman on paper, the house now worth a fortune, and her children were always pestering her to sell it, saying she didn't need all that space. But she told them to be patient, it would be theirs when she died, which wouldn?t be long now, and she said this kindly, to sharpen the bite of it, and to remind them how much they were motivated by money
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2c7b2dc
|
and he said if anyone should leave the home they had built it was him. But as he said this he felt he was acting, or if not acting then so confused as to be incapable of gauging his own sincerity.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
1d321ec
|
Neither much enjoyed catching unexpected glimpses of their former lover's new existence online, and so they distanced themselves from each other on social networks, and while they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried each for the other, less worried that the other would need them to be ha..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
815b1af
|
and each time she returned she told the maid to come with her, and the maid said no, for she had a sense of the fragility of things, and she felt she was a small plant in a small patch of soil held between the rocks of a dry and windy place
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
b3555c5
|
Perhaps he had been selfish, his notion of helping the youth and the country through teaching and research merely an expression of vanity, and the far more decent path would have been to pursue wealth at all costs.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
7e918a5
|
They were achingly beautiful, these ghostly cities--New York, Rio, Shanghai, Paris--under their stains of stars, images as though from an epoch before electricity, but with the buildings of today. Whether they looked like the past, or the present, or the future, she couldn't decide.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
b700374
|
and so neither talked much of drifting apart, not wanting to inflict a fear of abandonment, while also themselves quietly feeling that fear, the fear of the severing of their tie, the end of the world they had built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else would share, and a shared intimate language that was unique to them, and a sense that what they might break was special and likely irreplaceable.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
b6f5198
|
that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
6bb42a4
|
The maid was of an age at which men had stopped seeing her. She had had the body of a woman when she was still a girl, when she was married off, so young, and her body had ripened further after she birthed and nursed her child, and men had once paused to look at her, not at her face, but at her figure, and she had often been alarmed by those looks, in part because of the danger in them, and in part because she knew how they changed when she..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
86c243b
|
It seems that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
251def9
|
a couple that was long and unhappily married, a couple that made out of opportunities for joy, misery.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
a75e2cf
|
La confessione che chiama in causa l'ascoltatore e, come diciamo nel cricket, un demonio di palla da giocare. Se la rifiuti offendi chi si confessa, se l'accetti ammetti la tua colpa.
|
|
hamid
mohsin
reluctant
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
7658d60
|
Mi sembrava - e ad essere onesto, signore, mi sembra ancora - che gli Stati Uniti non facessero altro che affettare una posa. In quanto societa, non eravate affatto disposti a riflettere sul dolore condiviso che vi univa a coloro che vi avevano attaccato. Vi trinceravate nel mito della vostra differenza, nella presunzione della vostra superiorita. E ostentavate tali convinzioni sul palcoscenico del mondo, cosi che l'intero pianeta fosse sco..
|
|
hamid
mohsin
reluctant
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
632158f
|
Although it is traditionally associated with the end of summer and the impending arrival of autumn, September has always seemed to me a month of beginnings, a of sorts--possibly because it marks the commencement of the academic year.
|
|
autumnal
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
b247d86
|
every Friday, without fail, Saeed's father would drive home and collect his son and Saeed would pray with his father and the men, and prayer for him became about being a man, being one of the men, a ritual that connected him to adulthood and to the notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentle man, a man who stood for community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
23ce555
|
had tall windows and a usable, if narrow, balcony, with a view down an alley and straight up a boulevard to a dry fountain that once gushed and sparkled in the sunlight. 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 v..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
697ca62
|
You have only recently been introduced to the types of silences that exist in a home with one occupant, and emotionally you stagger about this new reality like a sailor returned to land after decades at sea.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |