Quotes from Mohsin Hamid

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 spring of sorts—possibly because it marks the commencement of the academic year.

flying robots from an alien power regularly strike down from the skies and kill Pakistani citizens.

love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.

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.

The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.

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.

Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimize the importance of the individual and maximize the importance of the group.

Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us. So it was with Saeed and Nadia, who found themselves changed in each other's eyes in this new place.

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

A woman walks by the gate, leading a little boy with a balloon of hunger in his belly and hair bleached by malnutrition.

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.

he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could loved in no other way.

and the more he looked the less white he seemed, as though looking for his whiteness was the opposite of whiteness, was driving it further away, making him seem desperate

They next faced the problem that confronted all young people in the city who wanted to continue in one another's company past a certain hour. During the day there were parks, and campuses, and restaurants, cafés. But at night, after dinner, unless one had access to a home where such things were safe and permitted, or had a car, there were few places to be alone.

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

no country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America.

touching each other, but without bodily adjacency, without release. They had begun, each of them, to be penetrated, but they had not yet kissed.

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 be.

It reveals opinions and attitudes that are malleable, showing the plasticity of what in any given present moment one typically presents as a rock of certainty.

Saeed partly resisted the pull of his phone. He found the antenna too powerful, the magic it summoned too mesmerizing, as though he were eating a banquet of limitless food, stuffing himself, stuffing himself, until he felt dazed and sick, and so he had removed or hidden or restricted all but a few applications.

But in his devotions was ever more devotion, and towards her it seemed there was ever less.

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.

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