More Than Just a Pretty Face Quotes

“Someone in a mosque once told me about the water behind people’s faces. This water, he said, changed depending on what you did and what you believed, and as you got older it began to freeze. The kind of life you led, whether your heart was full of love or joy or shrewdness or bile, all of this changed the nature of the water and, therefore, the look of your face. In this way, your face told the story of your life.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“That evil was the inability to recognize the humanity in experiences that were not your own, in experiences that seemed alien.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“That's amazing that you can do that."

"What?" I asked.

"Just, you know, make music by touching something."

You can do it too, I thought, remembering how the rhythm of my heart had changed when she'd wrapped her arm around mine.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“In other words, myths of racial and national supremacy are still around. We must speak against them. There’s no point in having a voice if you don’t use it, and it isn’t enough to use your voice to only speak your truth. If lies that oppress any people go unchallenged, if these lies are allowed to share space with the truth, they start to seem valid. They’re not, though. So we’ve got to use our voices against narratives of inequality whenever they’re repeated, even if we benefit from them. If we’re silent in the face of injustice, then we’re unjust too.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“When it comes to weather, San Francisco will always betray you.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“Tell me, Daynal Jilani, how exactly are you more than just a pretty face?" I gave her an adorable, irresistible grin. "I'm an absolutely gorgeous face.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“None of it would matter because the people we were trying to convince could only hear one story, which seemed perfect to them. That’s why it wouldn’t have mattered to Churchill if the Indians had possessed a voice. That’s why it didn’t matter to racists today, to bigots today, that there were black and Muslim and queer and other oppressed voices. They just embraced the narrative they’d always embraced. The existence of other narratives didn’t change anything.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“She’s right,” Maddy said. “You see, the way the history of our time is written will be different than the way history has ever been written before. The narrative and the counter-narrative will have to learn to exist at the same time. It is remarkable, if you think about it.” I”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“If history teaches us anything, it should teach us to not only look at the lights we kept on, but also the lights we put out.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“After all, there's no such thing as a perfect person. It's naive and unfair to think that just because you're infatuated with someone, they're somehow better than everyone, somehow more than human.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“I meant what I'd told Zar. Being in a relationship with someone meant compromise. You gave up things you wanted because your partner needed you to. I'd seen my parents do it for each other for years.
What he'd been trying to tell me, and what I saw now, was that there were some things you couldn't compromise on. The things that were part of you, that made up who you were, had to be appreciated by the people who claimed to love you. Otherwise, they were just trying to make you what they were.
That's not love. That's colonialism.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“Time, she said, brought clarity, or at least the possibility of it.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“I get up like a human should: mildly irritated and generally pessimistic about what will happen during the next eighteen hours.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“The quality of the life we are given, I think, may not depend on how long it is, or how rich we are in it, as much as it depends on how much laughter is given to us.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“The first rule of cooking, in my opinion, is to make what you want to eat yourself, so that's what I decided to do.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“Maybe you're just standing in the wrong spot and looking in the wrong place.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“Good friends, after all, care enough to pretend to
listen.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“The evil that let three million people starve in the Bengal Famine wasn’t that different from the evil that was with us still. It was the same evil that had led those soldiers to lie about the people they had murdered in Khataba. That evil was the inability to recognize the humanity in experiences that were not your own, in experiences that seemed alien. So, in a way, Kaval had been right. She’d asked me why it mattered what Churchill had done almost a century ago. By itself, it didn’t. Whether Churchill was a hero or a monster was not a problem we really needed to face. The problem we had to face was that the story that allowed Churchill to be monstrous—the colonial mind-set, the mind-set of supremacy based on race and nationality—was still alive. This was not about Churchill the man. This was about Churchill the legacy.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“I believe future history will be different, though, because these narratives of superiority will be challenged by narratives of equality. The way we remember the world as it is will be entirely new.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“In order to justify oppression of the Other, one has to believe, and has to get all participants in that oppression to believe, that the Other is somehow fundamentally different. Do you think that the people who put my ancestors on boats and ripped them away from Africa believed that black men and women were just as human as they were?” “No,” I said, “they thought they were better than the Africans.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face

“The communal psyche of the conqueror has never before been persistently challenged by the narratives of the conquered in real time. It is an entirely new phenomena in human history, made possible, of course, by the Internet.” “Okay,” I said, and took a deep breath. Bisma was always telling me it was okay to take my time before responding to a question or an idea, instead of rushing to say whatever seemed right. Time, she said, brought clarity, or at least the possibility of it. “So nowadays people who are wronged can actually speak up while they’re being harmed, which is different than how things were before. This makes it harder for governments oppressing other people to sell that oppression to their own population?” Bisma gave me an encouraging nod. “That’s cool and everything, but I’m not sure what it has to do with Churchill.” “It doesn’t have anything to do with him,” Maddy said with a shrug. “It does, however, have something to do with your project. You see, colonialism wasn’t sold to the British populace as an enterprise of conquest. It was sold to them as a moral enterprise by which they were ‘civilizing’ the world and stewarding races who couldn’t take care of themselves. Improving them. Trying to get them to live the kinds of lives that the British approved of.” “As Conrad points out in Heart of Darkness,” Bisma told me.”
― Syed M. Masood, More Than Just a Pretty Face