Moth Smoke QUOTES

66 " You see, it is my passionately held belief that the right to possess property is at best a contingent one When disparities become too great, a superior right, that to life, outweighs the right to property. Ergo, the very poor have the right to steal from the very rich. Indeed, I would go so far as to say the the poor have a duty to do so, for history has shown that the inaction of the working classes perpetuates their subjugation. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke

67 " I just gritted my teeth, took out a needle, and worked him out of my heart like a splinter. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke

68 " The city waits for thunder's echo, for a wall of heat that burns Lahore with the energy of a thousand summers, a million partitions, a billion atomic souls split in half. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke

69 " The poets say some moths will do anything out of love for a flame
[...]
The moth takes off again, and we both step back, because he's circling at eye level now and seems to have lost rudder control, smacking into the wall on each round. He circles lower and lower, spinning around the candle in tighter revolutions, like a soap sud over an open drain. A few times he seems to touch the flame, but dances off unhurt.
Then he ignites like a ball of hair, curling into an oily puff of fumes with a hiss. The candle flame flickers and dims for a moment, then burns as bright as before.
Moth Smoke Lingers. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke

70 " She’s drawn to me just as I’m drawn to her. She can’t keep away. She circles, forced to keep her distance, afraid of abandoning her husband and, even more, her son for too long. But she keeps coming, like a moth to my candle, staying longer than she should, leaving late for dinners and birthday parties, singeing her wings. She’s risking her marriage for me, her family, her reputation.
And I, the moth circling her candle, realize that she’s not just a candle. She’s a moth as well, circling me. I look at her and see myself reflected, my feelings, my desires. And she, looking at me, must see herself. And which of us is moth and which is candle hardly seems to matter. We’re both the same.
That’s the secret.
What moths never tell us as they whirl in their dances.
What Manucci learned at Pak Tea House.
What sufis veil in verse.
I turn her around and look into her eyes and see the wonder in them that must be in mine as well, the wonder I first saw on our night of ecstasy, and I feel myself explode, expand, fill the universe, then collapse, implode like a detonation under water, become tiny, disappear.
I’m hardly aware of myself, of her, when I open my mouth. There is just us, and I speak for us when I speak, and I must be trembling and crying, but I don’t even know if I am or what I’m doing.
I just say it.
“I love you.”
And I lose myself in her eyes and we kiss and I feel myself becoming part of something new, something larger, something I never knew could be.
Union.
There are no words. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke

71 " When I wake, it seems a little less hot than usual, so I’m worried I have a fever until light flashes behind the curtains and the sound of a detonation rolls in with a force that makes the windows rattle. As I step outside with a plastic bag over my cast, a stiff breeze pulls my hair away from my face, and I see the pregnant clouds of the monsoon hanging low over the city.
The rains have finally decided to come.
I sit down on the lawn, resting my back against the wall of the house, and light an aitch I’ve waited a long time to smoke. Suddenly the air is still and the trees are silent, and I can hear laughter from my neighbor’s servant quarters. A bicycle bell sounds in the street, reminding me of the green Sohrab I had as a child. Then the wind returns, bringing the smell of wet soil and a pair of orange parrots that swoop down to take shelter in the lower branches of the banyan tree, where they glow in the shadows. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke

72 " A raindrop strikes the lawn, sending up a tiny plume of dust. Others follow, a barrage of dusty explosions bursting all around me. The leaves of the banyan tree rebound from their impact. The parrots disappear from sight. In the distance, the clouds seem to reach down to touch the earth. And then a curtain of water falls quietly and shatters across the city with a terrifying roar, drenching me instantly. I hear the hot concrete of the driveway hissing, turning rain back into steam, and I smell the dead grass that lies under the dirt of the lawn.
I fill my mouth with water, gritty at first, then pure and clean, and roll into a ball with my face pressed against my knees, sucking on a hailstone, shivering as wet cloth sticks to my body. Heavy drops beat their beat on my back and I rock slowly, my thoughts silenced by the violence of the storm, gasping in the sudden, unexpected cold. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke

73 " I walk in the direction she tells me. I feel my pores opening, sweat and heat radiating out of my body. A firefly dances in the distance, leaving tracers, and if I turn my head from side to side, I see long yellow-green streaks that cut through my vision and burn in front of my retinas even after the light that sparked them has gone.

I emerge from the mango grove into a field. In the distance unseen trucks pass with a sound like the ocean licking the sand. A tracery of darkness curls into a starry sky, a solitary pipal tree making itself known by an absence of light, like a flame caught in a photographer's negative, frozen, calling me. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke

74 " She slips her arm around my shoulders and cradles my head against her breast.
We breathe together. Slowly.
Time passes, flowing, a long, less and less painful sigh. And I shut my eyes.
Pain becomes only physical again.
Fear recedes.
Anger flickers for a moment longer, gas in the pipes after the stove has been turned off.
She says, “I’ll take care of you.”
And I feel gratitude and happiness rise up inside me: old friends, long-forgotten and yet much missed. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke

75 " It was a summer of great rumblings in the belly of the earth, of atomic flatulence and geopolitical indigestion, consequences of the consumption of sectarian chickpeas by our famished and increasingly incontinent subcontinent. Clenched beneath the tightened sphincters of test sites and silos, the pressure of superheated gases was registering in spasms on the Richter scale.
Lahore was uneasy, and Immodium in short supply. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke

76 " And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, a chemical wonder in her eyes. "

― Mohsin Hamid , Moth Smoke