Exit West Quotes
"It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—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."
"Saeed thought of Nadia and watched the hawk."
"Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians."
"Nadia told Saeed to wait at a short distance, in a darkened alley around the corner, while she unlocked a metal grill door and entered the building alone."
"Nadia selected a record, an album sung by a long-dead woman who was once an icon of a style that in her American homeland was quite justifiably called soul, her so-alive but no longer living voice conjuring up from the past a third presence in a room that presently contained only two."
"In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real."
"Nadia watched Saeed’s features. In that moment they were tinged with wonder, and he looked, despite his stubble, boy-like. He struck her as a strange sort of man. A strange and attractive sort of man."
"Online there was sex and security and plenty and glamour. On the street, there was a burly man at the red light of a deserted late-night intersection who turned to Nadia and greeted her, and when she ignored him, began to swear at her."
"They did not hold hands until Saeed’s perspective had returned, hours later, not to normal, for he suspected it was possible he might never think of normal in the same way again, but to something closer to what it had been before they had eaten these shrooms."
"For many decades after independence a telephone line in their city had remained a rare thing, the waiting list for a connection long, the teams that installed the copper wires and delivered the heavy handsets greeted and revered and bribed like heroes. But now wands waved in the city’s air, untethered and free, phones in the millions, and a number could be obtained in minutes, for a pittance."
"They were achingly beautiful, these ghostly cities—New York, Rio, Shanghai, Paris—under their stains of stars, images as though from an epoch before electricity, but with the buildings of today."
"Deprived of the portals to each other and to the world provided by their mobile phones, and confined to their apartments by the nighttime curfew, Nadia and Saeed, and countless others, felt marooned and alone and much more afraid."
"It was as if they were bats that had lost the use of their ears, and hence their ability to find things as they flew in the dark."
"Nadia bought bags of flour and rice and nuts and dried fruit, and bottles of oil, and cans of powdered milk and cured meat and fish in brine, all at exorbitant prices, her forearms aching from the strain of carrying them up to her apartment."
"The evening class Saeed and Nadia had been taking was finished, having concluded with the arrival of the first dense smogs of winter."
"War in Saeed and Nadia’s city revealed itself to be an intimate experience, combatants pressed close together, front lines defined at the level of the street one took to work, the school one’s sister attended, the house of one’s aunt’s best friend, the shop where one bought cigarettes."
"Nadia and Saeed sat next to each other on the ground and caught up on the news, the tumult in the world, the state of their country, the various routes and destinations migrants were taking and recommending to each other, the tricks one could gainfully employ, the dangers one needed at all costs to avoid."
"He and Nadia held on to each other at first, cuddling, but cuddling grows uncomfortable after a while, especially in tight quarters."
"Without warning, people began to rush out of the camp."
"Days passed like this, full of waiting and false hopes."
"Sometimes they saw rough-looking groups of men and Saeed and Nadia were careful to keep their distance."
"Their funds were growing thinner, more than half the money with which they had left their city now gone."
"They tried to fish, alone, two people by themselves, all but surrounded by water the breeze was chopping into opaque hillocks."
"In the morning they heard in the distance someone making a call to prayer, at dawn."
"To have a room to themselves—four walls, a window, a door with a lock—seemed incredible good fortune."
"All over London houses and parks and disused lots were being peopled in this way."
"The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most."
"To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you."
"The operation to clear the migrant ghetto in which Saeed and Nadia found themselves began badly."
"They sat on their bed and watched the rain and talked as they often did about the end of the world."
"Courage is demanded not to attack when afraid."
"Decency on this occasion won out, and bravery."
"Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently."
"People bought and sold houses the way they bought and sold stocks, and every year someone was moving out and someone was moving in."
"The fear of the severing of their tie, the end of the world they had built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else would share."
"Even though they spoke less and did less together, they saw each other more, although not more often."