Nadine

“She thought she mattered little to him, but in this she was mistaken, as the musician was quite smitten, and not nearly so unattached to her as she supposed, but pride, and also fear, and also style, kept him from asking more of her than she offered up.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin

“...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, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world, so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope....”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things,”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West