Mohsin Hamid Quotes

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

Reality is observer-determined - it's a spatio-temporal process, which fortunately means that things must change.

I only remember the future.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

We live between two dense clouds; the forgetting of what was and the uncertainty of what will be.

Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

The past feels distant, even when it's near. The future feels assured, even when it isn't.

I mean the future has become old fashioned.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

The future is, of course, imaginary - an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences.

It doesn't get better, it doesn't get worse, but it sure gets different!

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future.