Syed M. Masood > Quotes

“...being with someone is an acquired skill. There is an art to it. Basically, you have to watch your partner take a chisel - or a war hammer, depending on the day - and chip away at the ideal version of them that you've created in your mind. The person you fall in love with is always slightly different from the person you need to stay in love with. More real and more flawed, but also more complex and better defined.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“All men are created equal. Except not really, because some men are created American. Other men are created rich. Some men are created American and rich and are still not content with the world they inherit, so they try to change it. They try to make it more to their liking by painting it with blood and flame.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“I am saying that you should read everyone else's story with the same respect as you do your own.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“How you begin things is important. This is true in checkers and in life, because at the beginning of things you are freer than you will ever be again. Once the game starts, every move you make is influenced by what someone else has done. The longer the game goes, the messier the board becomes, the more that influence grows. But the opening, Anvar, belongs to you.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Clocks cannot measure time. They can count seconds, minutes and hours, but those are not accurate measures of our experience of time. A day of hunger is longer than a day when you've eaten. How quickly time passes isn't constant. An hour can stretch out and seem unending. A year can pass you by before you know it.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Someone in a mosque once told me about the water behind people’s faces. This water, he said, changed depending on what you did and what you believed, and as you got older it began to freeze. The kind of life you led, whether your heart was full of love or joy or shrewdness or bile, all of this changed the nature of the water and, therefore, the look of your face. In this way, your face told the story of your life.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“Yet you are not modest like a Muslim woman. Your dress betrays what is in your heart.”
Zuha was wearing a simple long-sleeved shirt with dress pants. No one, except for Abu and his friends, could have had any objections. I was certain, however, that he thought her pants highlighted her legs too much, and her shirt emphasized her waist more than necessary.
I was still thinking about what to say when Zuha answered him. She spoke sweetly, but her words had the edge of a knife. “And your gaze betrays what is in yours”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Checkers is the game of life,” she said. “Idiots will tell you that chess is, but it isn’t. That’s a game of war. Real life is like checkers. You try to make your way to where you need to go and to do it you’ve got to jump over people while they’re trying to jump over you and everyone is in each other’s way.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“That evil was the inability to recognize the humanity in experiences that were not your own, in experiences that seemed alien.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“You know, Anvar, people don’t understand these days,” he told me, “the real sacrifice. They think their offering is the money they spend on the animal. Or they think it is the life of the animal. But it isn’t. You are the sacrifice. What you are feeling now? That is your sacrifice. The lives of other creatures are not yours to take. Life is precious and to end one is final. Remember to never take more from the world than you can give back to it.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“We live on stolen land,' I finally said, 'in a country built on slavery and reliant on the continued economic exploitation of other people. The oppressor always lives in fear of the oppressed. Americans have always been afraid-of those native to this continent, of Black people, or Japanese citizens they interned, and now of Muslims and immigrants. So the real question, I think, is who is next?”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“My point,” she said, “is that all your heroes were wanderers upon this earth. Moses, Jesus, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Ishmael, Muhammad…The history of the world is the history of people who went places. People who walked to the horizon.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“That's amazing that you can do that."

"What?" I asked.

"Just, you know, make music by touching something."

You can do it too, I thought, remembering how the rhythm of my heart had changed when she'd wrapped her arm around mine.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“I’m just saying, look for the truth. Look past the slogans and the spin and what people say their motivations are. Look at what they are actually trying to do, at the world they really want to create, and once you know the truth about them, if you still want to stand with them, to vote for them, go ahead.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“In other words, myths of racial and national supremacy are still around. We must speak against them. There’s no point in having a voice if you don’t use it, and it isn’t enough to use your voice to only speak your truth. If lies that oppress any people go unchallenged, if these lies are allowed to share space with the truth, they start to seem valid. They’re not, though. So we’ve got to use our voices against narratives of inequality whenever they’re repeated, even if we benefit from them. If we’re silent in the face of injustice, then we’re unjust too.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“I suppose we have to change the national anthem then.”
“You want to take out ‘the land of the brave’?”
“No,” he protested. “The whole thing has to be replaced.”
“With what?”
“With Britney. Remember ‘Oops!…I Did It Again’?”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“There is no true measure of pain. Each hurt is unique,”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Experience, you see, can be lethal to certainty.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Tell me, Daynal Jilani, how exactly are you more than just a pretty face?" I gave her an adorable, irresistible grin. "I'm an absolutely gorgeous face.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“Azza said something that's been bothering me. She told me that there is no beauty left in this world. She's not wrong, you know. Sometimes that is how life feels. It's like there is nothing good, nothing noble, nothing precious left. Everywhere I look there is only pain and struggle and just a shadow over everything. You should know that I never feel that way when I am with you. You're the light of my world. You make the universe beautiful.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“...we should be honest about who we are and what we do. We should tell the truth about things, even when it doesn't sound good or feel good or sell well. It's not enhanced interrogation, it's torture. It's not an extrajudicial killing, it's murder. We should call things by their real names. I'm just saying, look for the truth. Look past the slogans and the spin and what people say their motivations are. Look at what they are actually trying to do, at the world they really want to create, and once you know the truth about them, if you still want to stand with them... go ahead.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“When it comes to weather, San Francisco will always betray you.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“Humanity, as a whole, has a lot of practice in dealing with death. Only individuals struggle with it.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“You try to understand one other person, and you learn to love. You try to understand many people, and you become wise.

“And if you try to understand everybody?”

“Then you become a poet, of course.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Anyone who didn’t look back, I realized then, was stone already.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“The world is difficult sometimes for restless minds and imaginative hearts. Things go easier for you if you do what you’re told, when you’re told, and never ask any questions.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“A man can life a good life wherever he finds himself, I think."

"But not an easy one.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“There's not a single moment of my life that has not been better because you were with me. And that is all we are. Moments. You and I and everyone. That's what life is. It's just time, and it's ending, Zuha. Everyone is ending. Who really cares what anyone else thinks? We have to steal our happiness in the time we've been given. And you're right. The past is messed up. It's broken. So what? Time doesn't care about that. Time keeps happening and we can do it right moving forward because time's like water, like a river, like the monsoon. Its like the rain. You can't break the rain.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Every kid from the subcontinent knows that there are three acceptable career paths you can walk down. You can become a doctor, you can become an engineer or, if you are painfully slow, you can study economics or finance.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Stand up. Now balance yourself on one leg. That is free will. Now you keep standing as you are but lift up your other leg as well."
"I can’t. I’ll fall."
"And that is destiny.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount