Quotes from Mohsin Hamid

Power comes from becoming change

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

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.

We are all migrants through time. ELEVEN

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. Jealousy

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

to read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings

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

phones themselves have the innate power of distancing one from one's physical surroundings, which accounted for part of it

It's more of a novella than a novel. It leaves space for your thoughts to echo.

Polite? I said, less than radiant with joy. She smiled. I don't mean it that way, she said. Not being polite. Respectful polite. You give people their space. I really like that. It's unusual

exceeded only by sex.

so by making the promise he demanded she make she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

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.

Sufis tell of two paths to transcendence:

To Nadia, Saeed was if anything more handsome than he had been before, his hard work and gauntness suiting him, giving him a contemplative air, making out of his boyishness a man of substance.

one is to look out at the universe and see yourself, the other is to look within yourself and see the universe.

it's possible to open our eyes, to see, to recognize our solitude—and at the same time to not be entirely alone.

she felt she was a small plant in a small patch of soil held between the rocks of a dry and windy place, and she was not wanted by the world, and here she was at least known, and she was tolerated, and that was a blessing.

Rimsha Masih fiasco—in which they had championed the execution of a fourteen-year-old mentally disabled Christian girl for the crime of blasphemy, only to be roundly rebuffed by a rare confluence of sane elements within Pakistan's legal system, media, civil society, and clergy, who collectively revealed that she had been framed by a property-coveting local mullah—they

I thought about this. As I have already told you, I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing

How odd it would be to call Homer's Iliad or Rumi's Masnavi "the Great Eastern Mediterranean Poem.

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.

e quando usciva l'anziana signora aveva la sensazione di essere emigrata anche lei, che tutti emigriamo anche se restiamo nella stessa casa per tutta la vita, perché non possiamo evitarlo. Siamo tutti migranti attraverso il tempo.