White Teeth

- Ты ни за что не болеешь сердцем, Джонс, - продолжал Самад. - Ни за веру, ни за политику. Ни даже за свою страну. Как ваши смогли нас завоевать - для меня загадка. Ты же фикция!

- А чем бы ты удивил человечество в последнии часы перед смертью? - поинтересовался Самад, недовольный тем, что нарушили его приятное раздумье. - Доказал бы теорему Ферма? Постиг учение Аристотеля?

• Что? Кого? Не... Я бы, знаешь... занялся любовью с дамой, - сказал Арчи, застеснявшись собственной неискушенности. - В последний раз.

- Я осознал, что поколения, - продолжал Самад, пока они миля за милей мчались по однообразной равнине, - говорят друг с другом, Джонс. Жизнь не линейна, она не линия, а круг. И они говорят с нами.

Арчи пришла в голову забавная мысль: "А что, если этого человека не убивать, а просто свернуть? Свернуть и сунуть в карман."

(...) the past was where we did things trough a glass, darkly, whereas the future was always brighter, a place where we did things right or at least right-er ...

"What I have realized, is that the generations," Samad continued as they sped trough miles and miles of unchanging flatlands, "they speak to each other, Jones. It's not a line, life is not a line - this is not palm-reading - it's a circle, and they speak to us. That is why you cannot read fate; you must experience it."

Samad stepped forward. He had had a gun in his mouth and was emboldened by it. He had eaten an absurd amount of morphine, fallen trough the hole morphine creates, and survived. You are never stronger, thought Samad as he approached the Doctor, than when you land on the other side of despair.

And when things come to you easily, when things click effortlessly into place, it is so tempting to use the four-letter F-word. Fate. Which to Millat is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

Archibald is fine. He is like the washing-machine advert. He carries on and on as ever.

The English are experts at relinquishing one responsibility and taking up another.

She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk.

‘Well, take Alsana’s sisters — all their children are nothing but trouble. They won’t go to mosque, they don’t pray, they speak strangely, they dress strangely, they eat all kinds of rubbish, they have intercourse with God knows who. No respect for tradition. People call it assimilation when it is nothing but corruption. Corruption!’

Samad, when the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intellect go away,’ said the Alim, shaking his head. ‘And one third of his religion'.

You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence...

In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and colour, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

...he was overcome by the sensation that Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk on into the blackness.