Quotes from Mohsin Hamid

Without being conscious of it, you have allowed yourself to become fond of him not for the content of his character but for the fidelity of his echo.

It leaves space for your thoughts to echo

She thought she mattered little to him, but in this she was mistaken, as the musician was quite smitten, and not nearly so unattached to her as she supposed, but pride, and also fear, and also style, kept him from asking more of her than she offered up.

You know you're in trouble when you can't meet a woman's eye.

Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization's brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the creation of global institutions based on one-person-one-vote and equality before the law.

He whispers a benediction and breathes it into the air, spreading his hope for you with a contraction of the lungs.

and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called 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.

He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online. It seemed to Nadia that the farther 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.

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings — younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older...

Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.

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.

If he stayed, it would not be for them--need not be for them--but for himself. And yet each day he did stay. Bored and tense, true, but he stayed. And he discovered thereby how badly he wanted to stay. That the impulse to live was in him stronger than he might have imagined, undiminished by his bleak circumstances.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered, and if necessary was worth a fight.

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

It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself, (...), and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now, and the result was something not unlike relief.

a beautiful memory one knows has already commenced to fade. •

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.

Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops — like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease .

courage is demanded not to attack when afraid

Wings that had been growing for years stretched and pushed and I found myself flying.

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 knows has already commenced to fade.

Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.

Indeed, all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be offered to the reader as a form of self-help.