Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.

but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

they slept on the slender single bed together without speaking, without touching, or without touching more than the cramped space demanded, for this one night not unlike a couple that was long and unhappily married, a couple that made out of opportunities for joy, misery.

to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.

But mostly there was little to report, just the day-to-day goings-on of countless people working and living and aging and falling in and out of love, as is the case everywhere, and so not deemed worthy of headline billing or thought to be of much interest to anyone but those directly involved.

their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

We are all migrants through time.

It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself,