Salehi Hamid Quotes

Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through ~ Mohsin Hamid

Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimize the importance of the individual and maximize the importance of the group. ~ Mohsin Hamid

She was struggling against a current that brought her inside herself. ~ Mohsin Hamid

Six months have passed since that horrible, horrible event of terrorism in the twin towers and Washington. I hope people all over the world recognize that these bad people, these criminals who committed crimes like that will be shown to the courts, and the people will have justice, and that we all shall work together to prevent these bad people from hurting us again. ~ Hamid Karzai

One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom. ~ Mohsin Hamid

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

From the perspective of the world's national security apparatuses you exist in several locations. You appear on property and income-tax registries, on passport and ID card databases. You show up on passenger manifests and telephone logs . . . You are fingertip swirls, facial ratios, dental records, voice patterns, spending trails, e-mail threads. ~ Mohsin Hamid

There is no crisis in this country that requires us to set up a crisis headquarters. Iran is currently in a good situation. ~ Hamid-Reza Assefi

Think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is. ~ Mohsin Hamid

If you say: what is the way to knowing Him? I would say: were a small boy or an impotent person to say to us: what is the way to know the pleasure of sexual intercourse, and to perceive its essential reality? we would say: there are two ways here: one of them is for us to describe it to you, so that you can know it; the other is to wait patiently until you experience the natural instinct of passion in yourself, and then for you to engage in intercourse so that you experience the pleasure of intercourse yourself, and so come to know it. This second way is the authentic way, leading to the reality of knowledge. ~ Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali

Where love commands, the impossible concedes. ~ Alireza Salehi Nejad

The woman raked her gaze up his body as if checking out livestock. As she reached his face, her kohl-rimmed brown eyes lit with a challenge. "I am the one you know as Hamid Nabil Hassan. The most wanted man in the world. ~ Brynn Kelly

For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain - some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something. ~ Mohsin Hamid

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

Europeans should be patient and try to find a formula to resolve this nuclear issue. We are determined to remove any ambiguities over our nuclear ambitions and also protect our right. ~ Hamid-Reza Assefi

Afghanistan has moved forward and Afghanistan will defend itself. And the progress that we have achieved, the Afghan people will not allow it to be put back or reversed. ~ Hamid Karzai

I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political; I think they move together. ~ Mohsin Hamid

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits. ~ Mohsin Hamid

So what's Pakistan like? she asked. I told her Pakistan was many things, from seaside to desert to farmland stretched between rivers and canals; I told her that I had driven with my parents and my brother to China on the Karakoram Highway, passing along the bottoms of valleys higher than the tops of the Alps; I told her that alcohol was illegal for Muslims to buy and so I had a Christian bootlegger who delivered booze to my house in a Suzuki pickup. ~ Mohsin Hamid

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

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

It's very easy, if you come from a place like Pakistan, to imagine that there's a narrative of American aggression towards the place that you come from. But that, in itself, is just a political view. ~ Mohsin Hamid

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. ~ Mohsin Hamid

'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

Ozi made me feel so known. He made love to my insides, filling desperate gaps and calming unbearably sensitive places. ~ Mohsin Hamid

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

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create. ~ Mohsin Hamid

There comes a time when to be uncompromising is the only realistic course. ~ Hamid Algar

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. Saeed ~ Mohsin Hamid

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

The end of the world can be cozy at times. ~ Mohsin Hamid

Lightning's echo comes as thunder. And the city waits for thunder's echo, for a wall of heat that burns Lahore with the energy of a thousand summers, a million partitions, a billion atomic souls split in half. ~ Mohsin Hamid

O self of mine, keep travelling forever
and do not fall in love with anyone
except the Majestic Lord, the Everlasting ~ Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali

Dying is also an art and just like any other art it must be learned. ~ Alireza Salehi Nejad

If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren't differences at all. ~ Mohsin Hamid

INTELLECT AND ITS NOBLE NATURE. The noble nature of knowledge has been revealed through intellect. Intellect is the source and fountainhead of knowledge and its foundation. Knowledge is like the fruit of a tree and it flows from intellect, or like the light of the sun or like the vision of the eye. Why should it not be honored when it is the cause of fortune in this world and the next? What is there to distinguish between beasts and men except intellect? Even a ferocious beast which has got more strength than man fears a man at seeing him as it knows that he may put him into snare on account of his intellect. ~ Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali

When I wake, it seems a little less hot than usual, so I'm worried I have a fever until light flashes behind the curtains and the sound of a detonation rolls in with a force that makes the windows rattle. As I step outside with a plastic bag over my cast, a stiff breeze pulls my hair away from my face, and I see the pregnant clouds of the monsoon hanging low over the city.
The rains have finally decided to come.
I sit down on the lawn, resting my back against the wall of the house, and light an aitch I've waited a long time to smoke. Suddenly the air is still and the trees are silent, and I can hear laughter from my neighbor's servant quarters. A bicycle bell sounds in the street, reminding me of the green Sohrab I had as a child. Then the wind returns, bringing the smell of wet soil and a pair of orange parrots that swoop down to take shelter in the lower branches of the banyan tree, where they glow in the shadows. ~ Mohsin Hamid

They're criminals, they brutalized Afghanistan, they killed our people, they destroyed our land. ~ Hamid Karzai

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself. ~ Mohsin Hamid

when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography ~ Mohsin Hamid

So in many ways, the bombing at the end of this year and the terrorist attack of last year in Peshawar have bookended both those years in a very unfortunate way. But at a bigger picture since, the impression in Pakistan is that things are actually improving on the terrorism front quite dramatically. ~ Mohsin Hamid

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

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

There are words, which should leave unspoken, and the true value of a man lies in the words the he has for not saying. ~ Alireza Salehi Nejad

It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals. ~ Mohsin Hamid