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How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Mohsin Hamid

Top 10 Best Quotes

“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”

“But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.”

“It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .”

“Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.”

“Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a life of doing. And where money-making is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.”

“It is the first visit in many years for your son, finally a citizen of his new country and free to travel, and you try to suppress your undercurrent of resentment at his decision to absent himself from your presence in so devastatingly severe a manner. You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one.”

“... and time is the stuff of which a self is made.”

“You are a door to an existence she does not desire, but even if the room beyond is repugnant, that door has won a portion of her affection.”

“[…]when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in reading that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books[…]”

“For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”

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Book Keywords:

reading, death, creation, success, desire, stories, entrepreneur, affection, aging, book-reading, school, readers, adulthood, writing, shit, refugees, childhood, love, poverty, relationships, writers

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