Quotes from Mohsin Hamid

he said when his mother was dying he had been certain she would not die, certain until he was not certain, and when he finally knew she was dying, was not sick but dying, he saw how much she wanted to live, until the pain took that from her, and she wanted to go, or did not want to go, but needed to go, needed to go even more than she wanted to stay, and he had not been ready for that, for his mother to need to leave, and it was a terrible thing to see.

the meaning clear, but the judgment suspended, and left the matter at that.

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, and she was not wanted by the world, and here she was at least known, and she was tolerated, and that was a blessing.

The housekeeper screamed as she unlocked the front door, and the police arrived quickly after, two men in old-fashioned black hats, but they only looked in from outside, and did not enter. Soon there was a vanload more of them, in full riot gear, and then a car with two more who wore white shirts and black vests and were armed with what appeared to be submachine guns, and on their black vests was the word POLICE in white letters but these two looked to Saeed and Nadia like soldiers.

Armed college students were telling women to cover their heads.

Anders's pale father was the only pale person present, the only pale person left in the entire town, for there were by that point no others, and then his casket was closed and his burial was occurring and he was committed to the soil, the last white man, and after that, after him, there were none.

he wondered if this new way of speaking to one another, this unkindness that was now creeping into their words from time to time, was a sign of where they were headed.

all kind of ensembles, humans with humans, humans with electronics, dark skin with light skin with gleaming metal with matt plastic, computerized music and unamplified music

men pushing themselves as hard as they could push themselves, not exercising, but training, and perhaps not even training, but fighting, fighting the gravity the world exerts on all those who walk up on it, exerts seemingly equally, though in actuality not equally, not equally at all.

We were marvelously diverse... and yet we were not: all of us, Sherman included, hailed from the same elite universities- Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale; we all exuded a sense of confident self-satisfaction; and not one of us was either short or overweight.

what I would like is a raise.

muscularity, made more pronounced by her gauntness, and the near-inanimate

You're a watchful guy. You know where that comes from? I shook my head. It comes from feeling out of place, he said. Believe me. I know

what is natural in one place can seem unnatural in another, and some concepts travel rather poorly, if at all.

Princeton inspired in me the feeling that my life was a film in which I was the star and everything was possible

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, which it did for Saeed and Nadia, and so even though they spoke less and did less together, they saw each other more, although not more often.

I wish I was as old as my parents. Or as young as my son. I wish it didn't have to be me telling my wife to stay where she is, saying everything will be fine in a voice she doesn't believe and I don't believe either.

I hear the sound of my blood rushing out and I open my eyes to see it on the floor like ink and I watch as I end before I am empty.

It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself.

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 wondered.

Online you could form your own opinion of what was going on and your opinion was, likely as not, different from the next person's, and there was no real way to determine which of you was right, and the boundary between what was in your mind and what was in the world beyond was blurry, so blurry there was almost no boundary at all.

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.

In America, the murky, unknown places of the world are blank screens:

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.