“We are all migrants through time.”
Work
"In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet-- sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors-- doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. [This book] follows the couple as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are."--From regular print book.
Quotes
Showing 1-6 of 6
Mohsin Hamid
Canonical work source
“We are all migrants through time.”
“There was also closeness, for the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things.”
“All sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was, even the homeless ones who spoke no English, more at home maybe because they were younger, and when she...”
“She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.”
“...he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched,...”
“It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the wa...”