Homeland Elegies Quotes

“The established majority takes its "we" image from a minority of its best and shapes a "they" image of the despised outsiders from a minority of their worst.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Constantly defining yourself in opposition to what others say about you is not self-knowledge. It’s confusion.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Because being American is not about what they tell you—freedom and opportunity and all that horseshit. Not really. There is a culture here, for sure, and it has nothing to do with all the well-meaning nonsense. It’s about racism and money worship—and when you’re on the correct side of both those things? That’s when you really belong.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Isn’t it? I mean, when I first read this, I thought, ‘This is it. This is what we’re up against.’ In this country, the white majority is basically blind to the worst in themselves. They see themselves in the image of their best, and they see us in the image of our worst.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is, a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“She was put off that everyone always asked where she was from and never seemed bothered that they had no idea what she was talking about when she told them.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“The established majority takes its we-image from a minority of its best, and shapes a they-image of the despised outsiders from the minority of their worst.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Trump was no aberration or idiosyncrasy, as Mike saw it, but a reflection, a human mirror in which to see all we’d allowed ourselves to become. Sure, you could read the man for metaphors—an unapologetically racist real estate magnate embodying the rise of white property rights; a self-absorbed idiot epitomizing the rampant social self-obsession and narcissism that was making us all stupider by the day; greed and corruption so naked and endemic it could only be made sense of as the outsize expression of our own deepest desires—yes, you could read the man as if he were a symbol to be deciphered, but Mike thought it was much simpler than all that. Trump had just felt the national mood, and his particular genius was a need for attention so craven, so unrelenting, he was willing to don any and every shade of our moment’s ugliness, consequences be damned.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Every good story has the same shape. The beginning establishes a goal, the more tangible the better. In the middle we watch the fight toward that goal. The end is what happens when it’s been reached, or when reaching it’s finally failed. What I always say when I teach is: the longer the middle, the better the story. The middle is when we still don’t know the outcome. That’s when we care the most about what’s happening. The longer you can keep the audience engaged in the pursuit without actually resolving that pursuit—that’s real mastery.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“When the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly. —Toni Morrison”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“As always, the interpretation has more to do with the one interpreting than the one being interpreted”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“If all this sounds somewhat paranoid, I am happy for you. Clearly you have not been beset by daily worries of being perceived —and therefore treated— as a foe of the republic rather than a member of it.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Even suffrage was monetized, true political power lying not in the ballot box but in one’s capacity to write a check. We were now customers first and foremost, not citizens, and to buy was our privileged act.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“It was my first time back in Pakistan since 9/11, and I found a country very different from the one I remembered. Any love or admiration for America was gone. In its place was an irrational paranoia that passed for savvy political consciousness. Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption that no longer needed hiding; and married to all this, the ever-hastening redistribution of wealth to those who had it at the continued expense of those who didn’t.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“That’s why we’re behind. Because Muslim laws were trying to take care of wives and children! We’re behind because we cared more about what happened to people than money!”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“You see, bhai, the effects of war are always personal, but in fact, war is the least personal thing there”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“capitalism, Mary, clearly interrupted by her own tantalizing thought, looked up from the floor at which she usually gazed as she spoke—her left hand characteristically buried in the pocket of the loose-fitting slacks that were her mainstay—looked up and remarked almost offhandedly that America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is, a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought. The fatherland in whose name—and for whose benefit—the predation continued was no longer a physical fatherland but a spiritual one: the American Self. Long trained to worship its desires—however discreet, however banal—rather than question them, as the classical tradition taught, ever-tumescent American self-regard was the pillaging patria, she said, and the marauding years of the Reagan regime had only expressed this enduring reality of American life with greater clarity and transparency than ever before.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“the very movements of our minds transformed into streams of unceasing revenue for someone, somewhere.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Companies keep finding ingenious ways off bait and switch of the permanent corporate lie, that the customer - rather than profit at any and all human cost - is king.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Bork, along with economists like F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan—figures whose work I had never studied or even read until after that night in Harlem—advocated not the conservation of traditional structures but the abolition of them; they wished to eliminate all real checks on private enterprise; and they believed, in contradiction not only to all common sense but also to Gödel’s theorem, that the Market could be depended on to regulate its own aberrations and idiosyncrasies. In other words, however much Bork and others like him may have inveighed against personal liberties in the public sphere, they were positively gaga over individualism’s most wanton, unfettered forms in the private sector. Indeed, I’ve come to think that the central political paradox of our time is that the so-called conservatives of the past half century have sought to conserve almost nothing of the societies they inherited but instead have worked to remake them with a vigor reminiscent of the leftist revolutionaries they despise.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“So tell me. Why’d we fall behind?” “The corporation. Plain and simple.” “The corporation?” “The Romans created the corporation. It enabled them to protect assets from being redistributed after an owner’s death. Which meant money could have the time to really grow, take on its own center of gravity. We had no way to do that. Muslim inheritance laws are very clear. After death, the estate has to be divided among the wives and heirs. Because there was no loophole to get around it, businesses didn’t outlive their founders. Everyone wrote short-term contracts with each other, because you were always afraid parties in a deal would die, and you’d have to go to the wives and kids to be made whole. One-off deals were the rule, as there was no good way to shelter long-term ventures. Which meant no path to long-term material investments.” “We didn’t have any correlate for the corporation? I didn’t know that.” He shook his head: “Complete liquidation of assets in every generation until the late eighteen hundreds. Do you have any idea what that meant for private enterprise? And it only changed once we finally took a page from the Europeans and built a corporate concept of our own. But at that point, their money’d been growing for six hundred years! That’s banks and industries with a half millennium of accrued capital.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“The established majority takes its we-image from a minority of its best, and shapes a they-image of the despised outsiders from the minority of their”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Constantly defining yourself in opposition to what others say about you is not self-knowledge. It’s confusion. That much I’d figured out by the time I was in high school.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Whatever you think you are now, when you finish that book, you will be something different.”
― Ayad Akhtar , Homeland Elegies

“Elsewhere, I’ve referred to Trump’s ascendancy as the completion of the long-planned advent of the merchant class to the sanctum sanctorum of American power, the conquering rise of mercantilism with all its attendant vulgarity, its acquisitive conscience supplanting every moral one, an event in our political life that signals the collapse not of democracy—which has, in truth, enabled it—but of every bulwark against wealth-as-holy-pursuit, which appears to be the last American passion left standing. De Tocqueville would not be surprised. My father is no exception. Trump is just the name of his story.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“Father always called America the land of opportunity. Hardly original, I know. But I wonder: Opportunity for whom? For him, right? The opportunity to become whatever he desired? Sure, others, too, but only insofar as others really meant him. And isn’t that what Mary was saying all those years ago? That our vaunted American dream, the dream of ourselves enhanced and enlarged, is the flag for which we are willing to sacrifice everything—gouging our neighbors, despoiling our nation—everything, that is, except ourselves? A dream that imagines the flourishing of others as nothing more than a road sign, the prick of envy as the provident spur to one’s own all-important realization? Isn’t this what Father saw in Donald Trump? A vision of himself impossibly enhanced, improbably enlarged, released from the pull of debt or truth or history, a man delivered from consequence itself into pure self-absorption, incorporated entirely into the individualist afflatus of American eternity? I think Father was looking for an image of just how much more his American self could contain than the Pakistani one he’d left behind. I think he wanted to know what the limits were. In America, you could have anything, right? Even the presidency? If an idiot like Trump could get hold of it, couldn’t you? Even if you didn’t want it? After all, the idiot apparently didn’t want it, either. He just wanted to know he could have it. Or maybe the emphasis there needs to shift: he wanted to know he could have it.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“But in order to understand it, you’ll need to know at least this much: by 1947, Britain’s long-practiced imperial strategy of divide and conquer resulted in the to some ill-conceived, to others God-ordained decision to carve off zones of the Indian motherland so that Hindus and Muslims would not have to live side by side any longer. Little matter that Muslims and Hindus had lived together for hundreds of years in India; after a century of British policies pitting them against each other, stoking a constant conflict for which the British Raj offered itself as the only containing force, the king’s empire could no longer ignore the fact that the social fabric was on the verge of coming apart.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“She was put off that everyone always asked where she was from and never seemed bothered that they had no idea what she was talking about when she told them. Americans were ignorant not only of geography but of history, too. And most troubling to her was what she thought connected to this disregard of important things, namely, the American denial of aging and death. This last irritation would yield a malevolent concretion over the years, a terror-inducing bête noire that saw her to her grave, the thought that growing old here would mean her eventual sequestering and expiration in a “home” that was nothing like one.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

“The national mood was Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, nihilistic—and no one embodied all this better than Donald Trump. Trump was no aberration or idiosyncrasy, as Mike saw it, but a reflection, a human mirror in which to see all we’d allowed ourselves to become. Sure, you could read the man for metaphors—an unapologetically racist real estate magnate embodying the rise of white property rights; a self-absorbed idiot epitomizing the rampant social self-obsession and narcissism that was making us all stupider by the day; greed and corruption so naked and endemic it could only be made sense of as the outsize expression of our own deepest desires—yes, you could read the man as if he were a symbol to be deciphered, but Mike thought it was much simpler than all that. Trump had just felt the national mood, and his particular genius was a need for attention so craven, so unrelenting, he was willing to don any and every shade of our moment’s ugliness, consequences be damned.”
― Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies