Book Notes: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

I loved the theme of migration in Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. There were several quotes that resonated deeply with me and I’ve gathered them here:

Everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time.

Our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.

When the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.

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

We are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another.

Finally my favorite:

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

Loved it cause not only across countries but even if you just move from one city to another, so much gets left behind.