Quotes from Mohsin Hamid

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.

He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing.

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

Da parte sua, Saeed avrebbe voluto poter fare qualcosa per Nadia, poterla proteggere da quel che li aspettava, per quanto, a un certo livello, capisse che amare significa accettare che inevitabilmente un giorno non riuscirai a proteggere quel che hai di più prezioso.

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.

Saeed was certain he was in love. Nadia was not certain what exactly she was feeling, but she was certain it had force.

shame, for the displaced, was a common feeling

Avevano cominciato, entrambi, a essere penetrati, ma non si erano ancora dati un bacio.

abandoning the city to the predations of warriors on both sides who seemed content to flatten it in order to possess it.

But his dislike was so obvious, so intimate, that it got under my skin. I

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 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.

most of the battle. We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees.

a white man had indeed shot a dark man, but also that the dark man and the white man were the same.

I do not think that less is necessarily more. But I don't think that more is necessarily more either. - Mohsin Hamid

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.

All over the world people were slipping away from where they had been, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields, and slipping away from other people too, people they had in some cases loved.

Your teacher did not want to be a teacher. He wanted to be a meter reader at the electric utility. Meter readers do not have to put up with children, work comparatively little, and what is more important, have greater opportunity for corruption and are hence both better off and held in higher regard by society.

You see, it is my passionately held belief that the right to possess property is at best a contingent one When disparities become too great, a superior right, that to life, outweighs the right to property. Ergo, the very poor have the right to steal from the very rich. Indeed, I would go so far as to say the the poor have a duty to do so, for history has shown that the inaction of the working classes perpetuates their subjugation.

It is the effect of scarcity; one's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper. Moreover, once sensitized in this manner, one numbs only slowly, if at all . . .

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 acknowledge in one another

depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself...

He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labour camp and online. It seemed to Nadia that the further they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was unambiguously gone.

maintaining a strict neutrality between the two potential combatants, a position that favoured, of course, the larger and [...] more belligerent of them.

Ogni volta che si spostano, due partner, se la loro attenzione è ancora rivolta l'uno verso l'altra, cominciano a vedersi in modo diverso, perché 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.