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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3886bdf | Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 4edaf5a | Every soil does not produce every material. | Anne Robert Jacques Turgot | ||
| 2dad721 | I feel the illusion I've twirled around me like a sari start to come undone and fall to my feet. | illusion | Mohsin Hamid | |
| e6b67af | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 6b991a9 | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 5af26fc | Jocelyn was dumbstruck. She couldn't think of a single thing she'd done that might give that impression. "I don't." | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 6c86991 | for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| e31706c | 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.. | air-conditioning lahore | Mohsin Hamid | |
| 64f24bd | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| d1c5939 | A little paranoia crawls into my lap, purring loudly. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 0894554 | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 0993cfc | I love it when you talk about where you come from," she said, slipping her arm through mine, "you become so alive." | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| df02578 | Hoarse voice, from intimacy's border with asthma: parched beaches, dust whipped by the wind. Very sexy but not much to drink. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| c81ad40 | Power comes from becoming change. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| ea41255 | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 2a7e937 | 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. | humanity mortality | Mohsin Hamid | |
| 1d5ba2b | I get in, and she turns the music down. It's Nusrat, remixed and clubby, but damn good as always. | nusrat-fateh-ali-khan | Mohsin Hamid | |
| 23938fb | 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.. | monsoon rain | Mohsin Hamid | |
| b3e8b39 | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 141a862 | 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 .. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| b145e8e | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| f87bab4 | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| d0ab922 | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 7bb5bb0 | 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. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 4620230 | The alliance between the US and Pakistan is thus predominantly between the US and the Pakistani military. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 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. | closeness deah love temporariness time 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. | existence existentialism life space stargazing stars the-milky-way the-world wonder | 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 |