Quotes from Mohsin Hamid

So long awaited that its coming was a shock.

Geography is destiny

that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

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.

Here, in the heady bouquet of nature's pantry, your father sniffs mortality.

and since most people had little to barter with, they usually bartered with a promise of something to eat tomorrow or the next day in exchange for something to eat today, a bartering not so much of different goods, exactly, but of

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, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.

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. Clenched beneath the tightened sphincters of test sites and silos, the pressure of superheated gases was registering in spasms on the Richter scale. Lahore was uneasy, and Immodium in short supply.

end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things

And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, a chemical wonder in her eyes.

Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians. War

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's

It seems that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart.

In quei giorni i funerali erano più semplici e sbrigativi, a causa dei combattimenti. Alcune famiglie non avevano altra scelta che seppellire i propri morti in un cortile o in un punto riparato lungo una strada, essendo impossibile raggiungere un vero cimitero, e di conseguenza sorsero luoghi di sepoltura improvvisati, dove un cadavere ne attirava subito altri, un po' come l'arrivo di un occupante abusivo in un terreno pubblico inutilizzato può dare origine a un'intera baraccopoli.

for the pair themselves their closeness carried both a spark of the exotic and the comfort of familiarity, as many couplings do, when they first begin.

America is our enemy; America should give us more aid.

a couple that was long and unhappily married, a couple that made out of opportunities for joy, misery.

I like its eyes: two black dots, nonreflective light-trappers. Utterly determined eyes, doubt-free, unselfconscious. Frightening eyes if they happen to be looking at you and you're small enough to be dinner. The same eyes a man probably sees on an alligator before it drags him down and shakes the air out of his lungs and leaves him to rot a little in the murk, to be tenderized properly before he becomes a meal.

The alliance between the US and Pakistan is thus predominantly between the US and the Pakistani military.

He noticed her. He listened to her. He summoned the nerve to speak to her. And that, as they were both fond of saying when recounting the story of their meeting in subsequent years, was that.

She had bumped me out of the center of my world. I'd become a baby person, and it felt good, better than what had come before.

ambitious cleric position: "Religion makes us all equal; only I decide what religion says.

Suffice to say that theirs had been an unusual love, with such a degree of commingling of identities that when Chris died, erica felt she had lost herself; even now she did not know if she could be found p.104

You watch one after another of the ubiquitous, hyper-argumentative talk shows that fill your television, aware that in their fury they make politics a game, diverting public attention rather than focusing it. But that suits you perfectly. Diversion is, after all, what you seek.