Mohsin Hamid Quotes

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two: melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.

At seventeen, I knew the end of a dream... I would never be a schoolboy again.

Whenever you move, I think you lose your history.

After my grandmother passed away, I felt the urge to take my camera to her flat. I knew this flat from my childhood in Tel Aviv. Going to this flat was like going abroad; there was a real feeling of traveling across Tel Aviv and ending up in Berlin.

I was born in San Antonio, TX, but moved to Lakewood, CO in elementary school. Then, I moved to Valley Center, CA in high school.

I don't want to wake up and see my kids going off to college and wonder what happened.

I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.

I'd love to go back to when we played as kids, but things change. And that's the way it is.

... a man leaves much when he leaves his own country.

Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You'll miss them forever.

So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.

At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.

I don't think you can ever return, really.

The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

You develop relationships with people, and suddenly a family of actors and crew that you became so close to are now not around anymore. I'm not too sad about it because I got to move on to something else, but it's sad the way these things turn out.

Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.

A box of new crayons! Now they’re all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect. Soon they’ll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors. Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic.

I hate to see it go, I'll tell you that. I played here all my life. Eighteen years I played here and I'm sorry to see it go.

Change can be good but its always tough to let go of the past

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.