Saeed and Nadia knew what the buildup to conflict felt like, and so the feeling that hung over London in those days was not new to them, and they faced it not with bravery, exactly, and not with panic...
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.
Ozi made me feel so known. He made love to my insides, filling desperate gaps and calming unbearably sensitive places.
Ogni volta che si spostano, due partner, se la loro attenzione è ancora rivolta l'uno verso l'altra, cominciano a vedersi in modo diverso, perché le personalità non hanno un unico immutabile colore, c...
It leaves space for your thoughts to echo
I tried not to dwell on the comparison; it was one thing to accept that New York was more wealthy than Lahore, but quite another to swallow the fact that Manila was as well.
E così, qualunque fosse la ragione, quella volta la moderazione ebbe la meglio, e l'audacia, perché ci vuole coraggio a non attaccare quando si ha paura
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...
America is our enemy; America should give us more aid.
With towels so plush and fine that when she at last emerged she felt like a princess using them, or at least like the daughter of a dictator who was willing to kill without mercy in order for his chil...
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 m...
When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
We learned to savor the denial of gratification—that most un-American of pleasures!—
If they had but waited and watched their relationship would have flowered again, and so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born. Jealousy
If he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.
Flying robots from an alien power regularly strike down from the skies and kill Pakistani citizens.
And it was an easy promise to make because she had at that time no thoughts of leaving Saeed, but it was also a difficult one because in making it she felt she was abandoning the old man, and even if...
[…]when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when...
[...] maintaining a strict neutrality between the two potential combatants, a position that favoured, of course, the larger and [...] more belligerent of them.
Young men pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honour the goodness of the men who raised them, and Saeed was very much a young man of this mould.