347 Quotes by Mohsin Hamid

Saeed went with his father to pray on the first Friday after the curfew’s commencement, and Saeed prayer for peace and Saeed’s father prayed for Saeed and the preacher in his sermon urged all the congregants to pry for the righteous to emerge victorious in the war but carefully refrained from specifying on which side of the conflict he thought the righteous to be.

Information is key at these things: no one wants to be caught holding social stock that’s about to crash.

To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and awaits its fate, if only for a while.

If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren’t differences at all.

They finished their coffees. Nadia asked if Saeed had been to the deserts of Chile an seen the stars an was it all he had imagined it would be. He nodded and said if she had an evening free he would take her, it was a sight worth seeing in this lie, and she shut her eyes and said she would like that very much, and they rose and embraced and parted and did not know, then, if that evening would ever come.

Children are excellent judges of character, you know.

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.

I can understand it,” she said. “Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived.” “Millions arrived in our country,” Saeed replied. “When there were wars nearby.” “That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.

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.