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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0093158 | our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 0be38e3 | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| fcf6c3d | 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.. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| e349d7e | 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. | love | Mohsin Hamid | |
| 458666c | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 83b3e17 | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| f0df40f | 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. | note pride wallet | Mohsin Hamid | |
| 9e60130 | Ozi made me feel so known. He made love to my insides, filling desperate gaps and calming unbearably sensitive places. | loneliness love | Mohsin Hamid | |
| fd983c6 | I know I'm standing still, but I feel like I've stumbled and I'm starting to fall. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| a5d4444 | 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. | heat lahore rain summer | Mohsin Hamid | |
| 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| a4ebd20 | 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 | ||
| 3ae5b74 | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 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? | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 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 | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 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 |