The collection / 65 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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65 results · Page 3 of 3Play this collection ▷

01Undated

It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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02Undated

A common 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, which was defined to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniforms of soldiers. 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. This, I reasoned, was why America felt justified in bringing so many deaths to Afghanistan and Iraq, and why America felt justified in risking so many more deaths by tacitly using India to pressure Pakistan.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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03Undated

Time is our most precious currency. So it’s significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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04Undated

If differences can be hidden, perhaps there aren't differences at all

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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05Undated

Didn't you tell me smoking ruined your stamina as a boxer? ...Ruined is a strong word, I'd say....It helps fight boredom. It gives you more to do and less time to do it in.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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06Undated

Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they'd die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second love comes on the scene, because most hearts aren't big enough to love more than one person like that.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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07Undated

Love places someone else in the centre of your being and your own self is blurred.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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08Undated

America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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09Undated

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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10Undated

Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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11Undated

I think there's a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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12Undated

When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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13Undated

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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14Undated

'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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15Undated

Like many of my friends in the Pakistani diaspora - and many of my friends in Pakistan itself, for that matter - I have sometimes looked at the country of my birth and wondered whether its future will be one of steady and sad decline.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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16Undated

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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17Undated

When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.

Mohsin Hamid / quote

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