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The Reluctant Fundamentalist Quotes
Our relationship could now thrive only in my head, and to discuss it with a mother intent—admittedly in my own best interest—on challenging it with reality might do it irreparable harm.
— Mohsin Hamid, 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, 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, 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. 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. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own.
— Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
A single 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… 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.
— Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
…status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.
— Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings — younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older…
— Mohsin Hamid, 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, 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, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
— Mohsin Hamid, 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, 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, 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, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
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