The voices / 65 fragments

Mohsin Hamid

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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01Undated

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I'm pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can't do? Has she fallen in love with me?As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that she has.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

02Undated

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

Mohsin Hamid / quote

03Undated

There's a reason prophets perform miracles: language lacks the power to describe faith. And you have to land on faith before you can even begin to hike around to its flip side, betrayal.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

04Undated

We are all migrants through time.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

05Undated

I have this thing about friends and secrets. Sometimes when I meet a person I like, I tell them a secret they don't know me well enough to be told. It lets me judge their potential as a friend.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

06Undated

Secrets make life more interesting. You can be in a crowded room with someone and touch them without touching, just with a look, because they know a part of you no one else knows. And whenever you're with them, the two of you are alone, because the you they see no one else can.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

07Undated

A single strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie's concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism... I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

08Undated

The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

09Undated

But since the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorists have killed many times that number of people in Pakistan. Tens of thousands have died here in terror and counterterror violence, slain by bombs, bullets, cannons, and drones. America's 9/11 has given way to Pakistan's 24/7/365. The battlefield has been displaced. And in Pakistan it is much more bloody.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

10Undated

She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

11Undated

Language lacks the power to describe Faith.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

12Undated

Children are excellent judges of character, you know

Mohsin Hamid / quote

13Undated

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

14Undated

The end of the world can be cozy at times.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

15Undated

Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.It’s a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

16Undated

I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

17Undated

What happens is my mind starts to go in circles, thinking and thinking, and then I can't sleep. And once a couple of days go by, if you haven't slept, you start to get sick. You can't eat. You start to cry. It just feeds on itself.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

18Undated

He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. 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, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

19Undated

And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

20Undated

Our relationship could now thrive only in my head, and to discuss it with a mother intent—admittedly in my own best interest—on challenging it with reality might do it irreparable harm.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

21Undated

...status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

22Undated

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

23Undated

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.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

24Undated

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image. I think this protagonist, this self, often recognizes that it is a fictional construct, but it also recognizes that thinking of itself as such might cause it to disintegrate.

Mohsin Hamid / quote