In the Light of What We Know Quotes

“Life can only be understood backward; the trouble is, it has to be lived forward.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent: Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds. My father and I chuckled. What happened to him? Gone. My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you’re made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It’s only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“Listening is hard, as my friend once said, because you run the risk of having to change the way you see the world.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you’re made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It’s only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. It’s the strangest thing, this idea in quantum physics, and yet somehow unsurprising when you consider it as a metaphor. It’s when the thing interacts that its properties are revealed, even resolved.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“The whole thing is too abstract, continued Zafar, this business of our lives standing for something else. All we know is that we don’t want it to stand for nothing. So we dive headlong into becoming heroes, becoming the big swinging dick on Wall Street or the rock star or the hot-shot human rights lawyer. Which is about making our lives stand for something that our intelligence can grasp, saving us from confronting what we fear might be true—or what we would fear if we gave ourselves the chance—namely, that we’re accidental pieces of flesh, mutton without meaning.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“Our memories do not visit us in chronology, and the story we form by joining up the memories involves choices with the purpose of making a whole and finding a pattern.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“I am as impressed by honesty as anyone, but when there is a hint that a man is taking me into his confidence, my first instinct is to suspect him. Am I to be flattered? And is he about to break another’s confidence?”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“How many senators have taken their conception of what America can do from what they’ve seen on the American movie screen?”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“He, like so many of them, came from that breed of international development experts unsparing in its love for all humanity but having no interest in people.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“To go from America’s founding belief that it can form an ever more perfect union to a belief that it can reconstruct another country in the image of its hopes for itself – to cover that distance – does not take long.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing about reckless desire, the temptations of power, and the immanence of rage, or reading Naipaul might convince you to seize the ego that so wants to be loved, drag it outside, put it up against a wall, and shoot it.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“But that delusional urge is only one of the varieties of self-deception that encourage us to believe we know another human being and, for that matter, ourselves. This faith in having the measure of others really becomes unstuck when you begin to consider how many you’d acknowledge as having the measure of you. That number dwindles before your eyes.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“Yes, they mean well, but the only good that an absence of malice guarantees is a clear conscience.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“Maps, contour maps and all maps, intrigue us for the metaphors that they are: tools to give us a sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“In Bilaath, I said. Bilaath, or Vilayet as it has otherwise been transcribed into English, derives from Persian and Ottoman Turkish, in which the word meant governorate or district. In Bengali, the word is used to refer to Britain. In fact, one English colloquial name for Britain, Blighty, somewhat archaic these days and mainly reserved for comedy, is derived from the word Bilaath, which was current in India in the time of the British Raj.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“Het leven kan alleen achteraf worden begrepen; het vervelende is dat het voorwaarts moet worden geleefd.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In het licht van wat wij weten

“Mathematics, which doesn’t include the tawdry efforts of statistics or probability, pure mathematics, the product of the human mind turning to face itself, turning into itself, and finding in the realm of necessary consequences, where no contingent fact is to be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or touched – it discloses a beauty that exhausts human comprehension and a certainty the senses can never touch.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“I love America for an idea. The reality is important but ambiguous. In Senegal, there stands a building where slaves were stored before they were sent on to the New World. It was built in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence. I love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment. It may be an idea not everyone cares for, but it is one I need, I want. I love her for her thought, first, of where you’re going, not where you’re from; for her majestic optimism against the gray resistances of Europe, most pure in Britain, so that in America I feel like—I am—a sexual being.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“Every man, he said, carries his own pyre.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“Advisers were numberless in Kabul, like stray dogs in Mumbai.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“Afghanistan doesn’t have the oil of the Khazars, he said, and we’re not ready to prostitute our women like the Thais. Unlike the Westerner’s, ours is not a spiritual poverty but a material one. When our needs in that area are met, we will not have the dilemma or crisis of Western man.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“that the truth is finer and that the only answers each of us hears are to the questions we are capable of asking.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“The irony is that scientists are much less certain about what they say than politicians, policy makers, and pundits. The certainty of the kind you see in the face of a politician declaiming on tax increases or hear in the voice of a commentator condemning or endorsing a foreign policy decision, or the certainty you detect in the words of an op-ed writer pontificating on one thing or another—I used to think that they arrived at their certainty after considering an issue in great depth and finding that the evidence fell overwhelmingly in favor of a specific position. You must think me naïve ever to have thought this way. But I did. I used to think that a good argument was the midwife to certainty. If, as I now believe, it is the wish that fathers the thought, then certainty is the lingering imprint of a wish on thoughts and arguments, like DNA retained in progeny, acting invisibly but with visible effects.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“I have always believed—and believed it so clearly that I should say that I have always known—that certainty is a subjective state, and no less so the certainty about other subjective states, so that when one is asked whether one is sure about anything, one can only answer: Yes, but I might be wrong. One could even go so far as to say that one is absolutely sure but that there always remains the qualification that one might be wrong, for, if nothing else, between the subjective state of certainty and the world presented to us there is the mediation of this laughably fallible perception.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“My father tells a story about Richard Feynman, who’d been dubbed the Great Explainer because of his talent for explaining theoretical physics. When a journalist asked him to describe in three minutes what he’d won the Nobel Prize for, Feynman replied that if he could explain it in three minutes, it wouldn’t be worth a Nobel Prize. Feynman, I think, is making the wider point that an explanation of something by reducing it and simplifying it over and over, until all that’s left is some familiar metaphor that is actually without content, helps no one’s understanding of the thing itself and is only the repetition of a familiar image. Even the basic elements of financial derivatives are mathematical. But quite apart from the mathematical content, the other problem is that to understand derivatives requires, I think, an understanding of other more basic ideas in finance, whether or not they in turn have some mathematical content. It’s accretive, to use Zafar’s language. Perhaps this is not exclusive to finance. As far as I can tell, medicine is just the same, as well as the law.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“If I had my time again, I’d believe in reincarnation.”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

“I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times . . . In life after life, in age after age forever. – Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Unending Love’, translated by William Radice”
― Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know