“I think we're going back to the way things use to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors thought the distinction was necessary.”

“I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.”

“It’s a strange feeling, praying into your hands, filling the air between them with words. We think of divinity as something infinitely big, but it is also infinitely small — the condensation of your breath on your palms, the ridges in your fingertips, the warm space between your shoulder and the shoulder next to you.”

“Be careful with this one" said Dina, bending down to greet the cat. "All cats are half jinn, but I think she's three quarters.”

“Look at all the Eastern writers who've written great Western literature. Kazuo Ishiguro. You'd never guess that The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go were written by a Japanese guy. But I can't think of anyone who's ever done the reverse-- any Westerner who's written great Eastern literature. Well, maybe if we count Lawrence Durrell - does the Alexandria Quartet qualify as Eastern literature?" "There is a very simple test," said Vikram. "Is it about bored, tired people having sex?" "Yes," said the convert, surprised. "Then it's western.”

“They will wake up one morning and realize their civilization has been pulled out from under them, inch by inch, dollar by dollar, just as ours was. They will know what it is to have been asleep for the most important century of their history.”

“How dense and literal it is. I thought it had a much more sophisticated brain." "Your mother is dense," Alif said wearily. "My mother was an errant crest of sea foam. But that is neither here nor there.”