“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
“Secrets make life more interesting. You can be in a crowded room with someone and touch them without touching, just with a look, because they know a part of you no one else knows. And whenever you’re with them, the two of you are alone, because the you they see no one else can.”
— Mohsin Hamid
“We are all migrants through time.”
— Mohsin Hamid
“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.”
— Mohsin Hamid
“Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.”
— Mohsin Hamid
“And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I’m pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can’t do? Has she fallen in love with me?As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that she has.”
— Mohsin Hamid