Saeed wanted to feel for Nadia what he had always felt for Nadia, and the potential loss of this feeling left him unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing.
It leaves space for your thoughts to echo.
She thought she mattered little to him, but in this she was mistaken, as the musician was quite smitten, and not nearly so unattached to her as she supposed, but pride, and also fear, and also style, kept him from asking more of her than she offered up.
Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization’s brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the creation of global institutions based on one-person-one-vote and equality before the law.
He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online. It seemed to Nadia that the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was unambiguously gone.
Wings that had been growing for years stretched and pushed and I found myself flying.
Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.
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.
Information is key at these things: no one wants to be caught holding social stock that’s about to crash.
Many parents were strict, and sometimes weeks would pass without us being able to meet those we thought of as our girlfriends. So we learned to savor the denial of gratification – that most un-American of pleasures! – and I for one could subsist quite happily on a diet of emails such as that which I have just described.
I’m best in small doses, believe me.
It’s amazing what the gene pool will do to perpetuate itself.
You learn a lot about your man when you become the mother of his child.
What distinguishes the “war on terror” is that it is a war against a concept, not a nation. And the enemy concept, it seems to me, is pluralism.
You know you’re in trouble when you can’t meet a woman’s eye.
People often ask me if I am the book’s Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself.
The most important thing to keep in mind is not that we are all the same, but that we are all equally weird.
The privileged liberal position: “There should be equal rights for all; I should not have to share my riches with the poor.
Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.
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.