Quotes from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“If you have ever, sir, been through a breakup of a romantic relationship that involved great love, you will perhaps understand what I experienced. There is in such situations usually a moment of passion during which the unthinkable is said; this is followed by a sense of euphoria at finally being liberated; the world seems fresh as if seen for the first time then comes the inevitable period of doubt, the desperate and doomed backpedaling of regret; and only later, once emotions have receded, is one able to view with equanimity the journey through which one has passed.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“She was struggling against a current that brought her inside herself.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“You're a watchful guy. you know where that comes from?" I shook my head. "It comes from feeling out of place," he said. "Believe me. I know.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“She attracted people to her; she had presence, an uncommon magnetism. Documenting her effect on her habitat, a naturalist would likely have compared her to a lioness: strong, sleek, and invariably surrounded by her pride.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“...status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“You're never rude,' she said, smiling, 'and I think it's good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“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, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one's boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“For we were not always burdened by debt, dependent on foreign aid and handouts; in the stories we tell of ourselves we were not the crazed and destitute radicals you see on your television channels but rather saints and poets and — yes — conquering kings. We built the Royal Mosque and the Shalimar Gardens in this city, and we built the Lahore Fort with its mighty walls and wide ramp for our battle-elephants. And we did these things when your country was still a collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at the edge of a continent.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“You have reminded me of how alien I found the concept of acquaintances splitting the bill when I first arrived in your country. I had been raised to favour mutual generosity over mathematical precision in such matters; given time both work equally well to even a score.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“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.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“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, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“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 from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“When my turn came, I said I hoped one day to be the dictator of an Islamic republic with nuclear capability; the others appeared shocked, and I was forced to explain that I had been joking.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“[...] I stated to them among other things that no country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“Glaring is something we men of Lahore take seriously...”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“...not one of these worthy restaurateurs would consider placing a western dish on his menu. No, we are surrounded instead by the kebab of mutton, the tikka of chicken, the stewed foot of goat, the spiced brain of sheep! These, sir, are predatory delicacies, delicacies imbued with a hint of luxury, of wanton abandon. Not for us the vegetarian recipes one finds across the border to the east, nor the sanitized, sterilized, processed meats so common in your homeland! Here we are not squeamish when it comes to facing the consequences of our desire.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“I was saddened to find it in such a state- no, no more than saddened, I was shamed. This was where I came from, this was my provenance, and it smacked of lowliness.

But as I reacclimatized and my surroundings once again became familiar, it occurred to me that the house had not changed in my absence. I had changed. I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner, but that particular type of entitled and unsympathetic American who so annoyed me when I encountered him in the classrooms and workplaces of your country's elite. This realization angered me; staring at my reflection in the speckled glass of bathroom mirror I resolved to exorcise the unwelcome sensibility by which I had become possessed.

It was only after so doing that I saw my house properly again, appreciating its enduring grandeur, its unmistakable personality and idiosyncratic charm. Mughal miniatures and ancient carpets graced its reception rooms; an excellent library abutted its veranda. It was far from impoverished; indeed, it was rich with history. I wondered how I could ever have been so ungenerous- and so blind- to have thought otherwise, and I was disturbed by what this implied about myself: that I was a man lacking in substance and hence easily influenced by even a short sojourn in the company of others.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“It seemed to me then—and to be honest, sir, seems to me still—that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority…. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only in the rest of humanity, but also in your own.”
― Mohsin Hamid, quote from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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