Mohsin Hamid Quotes

“...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, so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope....”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“They are pursued by a pair of hawk-faced men dressed in black and white: both forbidding, both hungry, but one tall and slender, the other short and fat. Two reflections of the same soul in the cosmic house of mirrors, or uncanny coincidence? It is impossible to say.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke

“…the way people act around you, it changes what you are, who you are.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

“The self we create is a fiction. On this point, religion and cognitive neuroscience converge. When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as the 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, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

“Anders hoped he looked more brave than he felt, and the three of them were armed but they stopped when they saw him, a few paces away, and they stared at him with contempt and fascination, and Anders thought the one he knew stared at him with enthusiasm too, like this was special for him, personal, and Anders could perceive how self-righteous they were, how certain that he, Anders, was in the wrong, that he was the bandit here, trying to rob them, they who had been robbed already and had nothing left, just their whiteness, the worth of it, and they would not let him take that, not him nor anyone else.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

“The clerk was a beautiful man with delicate brown eyes and big brown hands, and he had been beautiful when he was a boy too, but not this beautiful, and she asked him if he was happy for having changed, and he said his changing colour had been only one of several changes he had been through recently, it all flowed together, he had gotten married the week before her brother's funeral, yes married, he repeated to her expression of surprise, his own expression no less surprised, as though he could barely believe it himself, and he was happy in his marriage, and he loved his husband, but her brother was there too, with him, and he would always be there, he knew that now, he had known it at the funeral, he had married and found a love and lost a love and changed colour, and which of these was most significant for him he could not say, but probably, probably it was not the colour.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man