The Reluctant Fundamentalist (3)

 'But I observe that you, sir, have stopped eating. Can it be sir that you are full? Very well, I will not insist; I will, however, order us some desert, a little rice pudding with sliced almonds and cardamom, the perfect sweetening for an evening such as ours, which is taking a turn towards the grimmer side. Such dishes may not normally be to your taste, but I would encourage you to have, at the very least, a tiny bite. After all, one reads of the soldiers in your country are sent to battle with chocolate in their rations, so the prospect of sugaring your tongue before undertaking even the bloodiest of tasks cannot be entirely alien to you.'.

From page 157 of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007. 

From 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' (2)

'The economy is an animal' Jim [my boss] continued. 'It evolves. First it needed muscle. Now all the blood it could spare was rushing to its brain. That is where I wanted to be. In finance. In the co-ordination business. And the is where you are. You're blood brought from some part of the body that the species does not need anymore. The tailbone. Like me. We come from places that were wasting away.'. I had finished replacing the tyre so I shut the boot and unlocked the doors. 'Most people don't recognise that, kid,' he said buckling himself in beside me and nodding his head in the direction of the building we had just left. 'They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.'.

From page 110 of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.   

From 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' (1)

'I did not grow up in poverty, but I did grow up with a poor boys sense of longing, in my case not for what my family never had, but what we had had, and lost. Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way the homeless hold on to lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addictions; unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic and suicide. In this Jim [my boss] and I were similar: he had grown up outside the candy store and I had grown up on the threshold as the door was being shut.'.

Page 81 of  'The Reluctant Fundamentalist', by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.