Quotes from Mohsin Hamid

My mind disappears behind desperate terror.

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.

I'm more unsettled than nervous. It's like I'm an oyster. I've had this sharp speck inside me for a long time, and I've been trying to make it more comfortable, so slowly I've turned it into a pearl.

The arc of a child's life only appears for a while to match the arc of a parent's, in reality one sits atop the other, a hill atop a hill, a curve atop a curve. His arc now needed to curve lower while his son's still curved higher.

He knew how little it took to make a man into meat: the wrong blow, the wrong gunshot, the wrong flick of a blade, turn of a car, presence of a microorganism in a handshake, a cough. He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing.

Saeed went with his father to pray on the first Friday after the curfew's commencement, and Saeed prayed for peace and Saeed's father prayed for Saeed and the preacher in his sermon urged all the congregants to pry for the righteous to emerge victorious in the war but carefully refrained from specifying on which side of the conflict he thought the righteous to be.

and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son and, yes, your ex-wife and you have loved the pretty girl, you have been beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have ...

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.

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.

He preferred to abide, in a sense, in the past, for the past offered more to him.

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.

But then around her she saw all these people of all these different colors in all these different attires and she was relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred to her that she had been stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed and a new time was here.

Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.

Both would also wonder if this meant that they had made a mistake, that if they had but waited and watched their relationship would have flowered again, and so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

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.

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

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.

Le personalità non hanno un unico immutabile colore, come il bianco o il blu, ma sono come schermi illuminati, e le sfumature che proiettiamo dipendono da ciò che ci circonda

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

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.

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

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

E così, qualunque fosse la ragione, quella volta la moderazione ebbe la meglio, e l'audacia, perché ci vuole coraggio a non attaccare quando si ha paura

Anders knew he would soon lose his father, and that impending loss seemed more concrete now, more real, not like air but like a door or a wall, something you could bang against, bang into, and of course children know they will lose their parents, they know it from early on, but most are able to believe that that particular present will not come, that it is years away....